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Eeepc no good, nor any old clunker. I’m using a Thinkpad, 2nd hand, dedicated to capture only, never had a problem, no apps other than capture software, no internet unless i connect it by cable at home. Every thing installed will use resources and slow things down regardless if its running or not. I wanted 16gb memory to avoid hitting limits. Multiple physical SSD internal, NO HDD at all. Several USB3 ports and an external highspeed large 2+TB USB3 SSD to capture to.
One internal SSD about 80GB at most, high speed and small to install OS ONLY, a separate SSD for capture/control apps ONLY. Many computers are designed to share a comms/data channel with efficient asynchronous control which so by isolating OS to one physical SSD it gets the fastest non shared pathway possible so you dont get lost packets in capture because of bottlenecks when trying to write to the device while reading, likewise a second drive for the apps isolates them too. Ideally three internal SSD would let you assign all caching/paging/temp to another separate physical device again giving most efficient performance. Laptops with lots of usb ports usually means its a built in hub which is not the cleanest comm pathway, you only need USB3 for best camera capture performance and another to write to a dedicated ultra high speed external device, Again this means unshared hardware or data /comms pathways where you can get packet loss while the underlaying OS does other stuff with them. NO Wifi and no running antivirus stuff it all slows things down. CPU speed GHz should be high, number of cores is irrelevant capturing is a single data channel using only one core by nature usually, so go for Ghz not cores, cores helps if you are running other stuff and essential there so only one can be maxed for capture. The philosophy is to reduce to the simplest tasks and here your focus should be capturing usable frames from a camera, so depending on your targets it might require high frame rate, which means its essential to keep usb channel clean of data traffic and avoid HDD which cant write fast enough the large video files, isolating OS and apps to separate drives means the OS isnt slowing down trying to read/write to the same physical device, because it will be reading and writing no matter what. I pare down parts of the OS too and block others so the OS is just fast and focused for my capture software only. I dont do anything else with the laptop, its single function focused still Win 7 so doesn’t have the newer garbage of 10 or 11. I only connect online for drivers checks and I control all protection of it doing that . So if you know what you’re doing you can use anything fast from the last decade and quality machine are out there 2nd hand cheap as most people think they need the latest gaming laptop etc.
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