It has been several years since I bought a new personal
computer--the last being an entry level Dell PC with
a Celeron processor and a CD-writeable drive. I had
hoped to put home videos onto CD-R's, but I was
disappointed by the whole process: The 40 gigabyte
hard drive filled up too fast with the captured analog
video, and the process of generating SVHS or even just
VHS quality video took a hour of 'rendering time'
etc etc.
And then my Sony DVD player would not even play the video!
(even though it is supposed to read some CD roms)
Come to think of it, I am not sure my video worked on
my Samsung player either--and that device works much
better than the older Sony. Anyway...
I partly took advice here and bought a new PC, it has one
of these "dual core" CPUs (I don't know what that will
do for me, but it has to be an upgrade from the Celeron.
Message 22552928
Once again I have shopped the Dell Outlet. I once vowed
never to spend more than $500 on a new PC. With taxes and
shipping I came in just under my limit. I remember spending
around $2500 on my first PC, a 486. And then upgrading it
over and over again. That is too much to spend on a PC
when you can just wait a few years and buy cheaper. I
suppose that is the same thing I do buying used Fords, heh.
I'll report back after it shows up to my door and I've given it a good going over.
It is a Dell 5150/E510 with "Pentium D--820" 2.8ghz
intel.com
This PC has four times the hard drive space of my old
PC and a DVD burner. I sorted for PCs that had a
gigabyte of system memory, and also found one with a
low-end video card, but happened to have 256megs of ram
on it--it is an ati x600se 256, but not sure that it
will really do much more than basic onboard video would
do for me (and it is not used as the capture card anyway).
I own a Studio 8 DC10+ (I think that is it) from Pinnacle
Systems that I will use for video capture.
About once every ten years or so my folks pull out
super 8 home movies of the family camping trips, Christmas
morning, and lousy quality film of us skiing in the mid '70s.
Pictures are nice and all that, but the few snippets of old
home movies are pure gold. |
