New media computer

[Toetagger]

We are looking to purchase a new media computer to replace an old laptop that we used. The sole purpose of this computer will be to run easy worship for backgrounds, words, scriptures, and if possible videos. I know I am looking for probably an i7 dual or quad core with around 8gigs of RAM and a video card with 1gig dedicated or above. I am not sure if easy worship relies more on the video card or the ram/processor for performance but we have experienced slowness with the laptop with changing the margins, switching from background to logo and back ad it would never run videos smoothly. We would love to be able to run our videos through easy worship for smoother transitions but if it doesn't work it would not be a deal beaker.

After a quick look i think we would be looking at something like this:

Core i7 2600 / 3.4 GHz
RAM 10 GB
Radeon HD 6850

other specs i don't believe are an effect on performance but I could be wrong.

[DaveJ]

On Easy Worship's web site, they have recommendations for graphics and hardware.

[Toetagger]

Yeah I had seen that was just trying to see if anyone had real experience with any certain setup.

[EricE]

Originally Posted by Toetagger

we have experienced slowness with the laptop

Ding Ding Ding! Laptop hard drives are among THE SLOWEST in all of computerdom.

Swap out the hard drive for an SSD (or remove your optical drive and replace it with an SSD if you can/need hard drive space more than the optical drive) and you may find you don't need a new computer after all.

Also presentation software seems sensitive to video RAM, sometimes more than hard drive speed - if your laptop has integrated video that's a double whammy - most integrated graphics shares system RAM for the video memory. Not only does that lower the amount of system memory available for your OS and apps, but system memory is much slower than dedicated VRAM.

Integrated video is really, really evil... Check your laptop - sometimes if the power saving settings are misconfigured even if you have a dedicated graphics card, it could be switched off and you could be using integrated video - which is less power hungry - great for when you are the go and on battery, but no so much when running presentation software!

For all these reasons, desktops are usually much better for presentation software than laptops - but it's not a sure thing. With some tuning, your laptop might be more than sufficient.

[DaveJ]

I've used www.ccbnonprofits.com at 2 churches

[DaveJ]

Ignore above info, placed reply in wrong place