New Laptop For Solar Camera - General Discussion

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marktownley
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New Laptop For Solar Camera - General Discussion

Post by marktownley »

Hi All,

Had one of those annoying moments yesterday when from nowhere my laptop just stopped working and died... :( Tried various things and there seemed to be no life so resorted to having a look to buy a new one.

It's one of those moments when you then start thinking about all the software that has been installed and the work that's going to be needed to get things reinstalled and reconfigured, it's a real PITA. It's also an expense I didn't really want straight after xmas.

Anyhoo, this morning I resorted to the final tried and tested fixing technique of shaking the laptop vigorously whilst also swearing at it. Miraculously it came back alive (hence me back on the internet again!). Either way I think a new lappy is something I need to keep in the back of my mind and so wondered what the experiences of others were on the subject.

I use FLIR cameras and they recommend a 3.1GHz processor as a minimum, however my current i7 runs at 2.6Ghz and I don't seem to have any problems. I rarely get my IMX174 chip running at the specified 163fps, but I regularly get 120fps which i'm happy with. My current lappy has 8Gb ram and where I can an increase here will help is in the frame buffer in Firecapture - more RAM = more buffer, which is good, however there still will be a write time lag? I know a SSD drive is a must, however how does graphics processor affect us with our fast frame rate cameras?

My other laptop questions concerns Autostakkert - this seems to be a bottle neck in post processing, waiting for AS3 to process files... They go much slower than I would like. What would speed things up in AS3?

Mark


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Re: New Laptop For Solar Camera - General Discussion

Post by EGRAY_OBSERVATORY »

Hello Mark,
Of course I know of the dis-heartening problems of having a laptop or PC which fails for whatever reason and do understand your comments.

Without going into the tech side of camera-types/speed and pc-speeds, which in any case I am not qualified to suggest, my experience back in around June'20, was for the observatory to do away with a laptop and install a state of the art computer (not a laptop) c/w with every type of connection available, compared to laptops which today have just the minimum quantity and type of sockets. The opportunity of including two large monitors (one hi-res) was also achieved - running from the one computer without the need for changing plugs was a plus...

Yes, the need for re-wiring etc., was also necessary, so the 3-months required was undertaken succesfully.

That has paid-off, but still the need to install every available program took for ages, including testing and the fairly short amount of available of Sun-light before December'20 when the low-down Sun stopped observatory-imaging. (I don't tend to do any amount of night-time imaging during the Winter-months)...

Ideally the need to both back-up everything regularly to an external Hard-Disk Drive is mandatory, but of course one should also consider having more than one PC/Computer to rely on. I have three + one further (rarely used) tower, as with aircraft-systems, back-up systems are usually available i in the event of.

Also to have the attention of both an IT expert as well as an excellent small-business computer expert and supplier has been very handy too...

I wish you the best of solving the issue(s) and don't yet get to the "hammer" method, even though it may or may not fix the problem.

Finally to buy cheap is not a good answer, as one only gets what one pays for - usually...

Cheers
Terry


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Re: New Laptop For Solar Camera - General Discussion

Post by marktownley »

Thanks guys.

Regards using desktops isn't really an option, my observing pad is away from the house and locating pcs at the pad is not an option. My cameras are all USB3 so I need this option and I think laptop is best for me, as, will be used for other things, web browsing, outreach, etc.

I could consider a dedicated laptop for imaging, One of the options I was considering had facility to add another ssd, which would make a lot of sense for the degradation through write/rewrite. I need to look around at the options.

And, the less £££ the better :D


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Re: New Laptop For Solar Camera - General Discussion

Post by rsfoto »

Hi Mark,
I rarely get my IMX174 chip running at the specified 163fps, but I regularly get 120fps which i'm happy with
Frames per second rate always depends of the exposure time and 163 fps is an exposure time of about 6 ms and if you get that then there is a problem with the internal USB bus which is very common in many PC's or Laptop's.

I get an exposure time of about 9 ms in average for my White Light set up and there I get about 82 fps with an ASI 290MM Cool from ZWO.

Since a few years I am using LENOVO Laptops and Tower PC and they work great.


regards Rainer

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Re: New Laptop For Solar Camera - General Discussion

Post by JochenM »

Hi Mark.

Some nice targeted swearing has never failed me either in getting things solved; nice work! ;)

If I understand correctly, you'll be using the laptop for both capturing and processing the data? In that case, the advice given so far in this thread is spot on as far as I'm concerned. A decent CPU (AS! will like this), enough RAM and an (M.2) SSD. You might be able to save a bit on the GPU (don't need a super fancy one), I would indeed stay away from the onboard shared graphics as mentioned though.


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Re: New Laptop For Solar Camera - General Discussion

Post by marktownley »

Thanks guys, some useful ideas. Yes, that's right Jochen, I will be using the laptop to first capture the data and then to post process it.


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Re: New Laptop For Solar Camera - General Discussion

Post by Montana »

Mark, I had this in June last year and it is a real pain. We kept looking at the Dell website (Dell Outlet) for refurbished but they keep selling odd laptops which are top of the range (high spec) but a year old and we went for one of those. We wonder where they find them. Mine is a Dell Precision 7730 i7 -8750H (6 core, 2.2GZ to 4.1GHz, 17inch 4K screen, NVDIA Quadro P4200 8GB GDRDR5, 32GB 32000MHz ram, with a 6TB Samsung SSD. You can get them for half price, so keep looking at the offers.

All the cameras work great on it and the programs works great. However, be cautious about a 4K screen, it's poor when using the FLIR cameras as you get digital banding in the blacks and it is a real pain. It has greatly improved using a X-rite i1 Display Pro Colorimeter and it has solved most of the issues.
USB3 sockets are no longer powered so you have to use a USB-c/thunderbolt adapter to power the cameras.

Do not name your user account (hard drive) with symbols. We named our computer Alexandra & Darren in setup and this means that it is impossible to get FireCapture to work. So make sure you only call yours a single name. The only way we can get round it was after weeks of fiddle however anything past v6 won't work. The only way round would be to open another user account on the computer in the future to get round this. This was a fatal error.

Getting old things like the DMK41 has been a nightmare to get working, but modern cameras work fine.

Good luck, it took the Hubby months of frustration and fiddle but I think after 6 months we are nearly there.

Alexandra


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Re: New Laptop For Solar Camera - General Discussion

Post by Martin_S »

Mark, here's a fix you can try for your laptop as a last resort before spending your money on a new one.

https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-use-sfc ... es-2626161


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Re: New Laptop For Solar Camera - General Discussion

Post by marktownley »

Martin_S wrote: Mon Jan 04, 2021 9:01 pm Mark, here's a fix you can try for your laptop as a last resort before spending your money on a new one.

https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-use-sfc ... es-2626161


Martin
Thanks Martin, I really do need to get a new lappy sooner rather than later, this one really is held together with gaffa tape...


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Re: New Laptop For Solar Camera - General Discussion

Post by DeepSolar64 »

I need to get a new laptop for my ZWO ASI174MM. The old 2009 model I have runs it very poorly.


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Re: New Laptop For Solar Camera - General Discussion

Post by marktownley »

I've just been sat looking at different options for laptops. As with everything they start off cheap and go up to silly money. I don't have silly money to drop on one at the moment so as always there will be compromises and trade offs that have to be made.

There's still life in this one i'm using I hope, so will just have to put some money aside in the months ahead.


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Re: New Laptop For Solar Camera - General Discussion

Post by Carbon60 »

Hi Mark,

Getting a new computer set up and running certainly can be a pain, for sure, but we all know it has to happen sometime :roll: :roll:

Firstly, I would suggest making a backup of your current laptop. Not just files/folders, but a COMPLETE copy of everything. I use Backup Plus from Seagate and their ‘Toolkit’ app to safely keep a copy of everything on my laptop. Now yours is up and running, probably it is worth looking into this option before it crashes again.

As for a new laptop, it might be worth taking a look at PC Specialist here in the UK. They build systems to your spec, so you can focus on the things that really matter and spend on the stuff you actually need. Here’s a link.
https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/

For me I focused on a fast processor (i7 4710MQ CPU) running at 2.5 GHz and added 16GB RAM, 230GB SSD and 1TB hard drive, USB2 and 2x USB3 sockets, HDMI.

It’s now a few years old (maybe 5), so higher specs are available (more SSD space would be useful).

This runs everything I need.

Hope this helps.

Stu.


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