Looking for a video editing machine

RazWaz

Hi, just got a couple of questions for anyone who can help. A few months ago I started recording PS3 footage, editing it and uploading it to youtube, it's become a bit of a hobby and people seem to like it as I've had over 85k views so far.

I've got a pretty nasty shoulder problem which isn't going to go away until I have an operation on it next June, and sitting at the PC working on my videos is getting quite painful. I don't seem to have any problems using my laptop as I can get comfortable on the sofa and support my back/shoulder, but I can't use that for my videos as the capture hardware I use isn't compatible with macs.

The PC machine that I've been using is pretty old, running XP, 2.5ghz dual core AMD processor, Geforce Graphics card 512mb, and 2GB ram.

I'm looking at specs for a new laptop but as I switched to using macs around 2006 I've no idea what the new windows operating systems are like for using resources, so I don't know if you can compare specs from windows 7 to xp.

I've found a laptop I kinda like - Specs are 2.53GHz Intel Core i5 processor, 6GB DDR3 ram, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 512mb dedicated graphics. OS is Windows 7

Will the above machine be able to render videos at least as fast as my current PC? (specs are above) Or will it be much slower/faster?

Also is £499 a good price for a machine around those specs?

Does anyone have any recommendations on the minimum specs I should be looking for, or any laptops they have seen that would be a good deal? It does need to be a laptop though, if I could use a desktop, I'd carry on using the one I already have as it does the job well enough, it just hurts to much to use it.

closed

remote control the pc using vnc?

RazWaz

Would I be able to control a PC from a mac? I'd also be concerned about the video quality - the capture quality as it drops when the PC is using more than one program.

closed

yes, you need a vnc client/viewer on the mac, and a server on the pc.

it's pretty lightweight