Laptop feedback/question

[perseus2]

I just bought a Toshiba Satellite P4 1.6 Ghz with an nVidia GeForce 4 440 go graphics card. The card has 32 MB of memory, the system has 512.

First of all, I want to say that I'm very impressed with this system for running Maya. I've done a lot of modeling, animation, fur, particles, expressions - just kind of trying to push the system to see what it does. So far, it has done everything extremely well and I'm very happy.

The one area where it seems to fall apart is with image planes - I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with this configuration or with optimizing the image planes in general. Actually, the only time it's an issue is if I'm looking through the camera that the plane is attached to, and if I've adjusted the color gain, color offset, and/or the alpha gain of the image. - it grinds performance to a near halt. If I use the default settings or look through a different view everything seems fine.

I've tried various formats including iff, jpg, targa and tif (with and without compression) and I've taken the image plane into photoshop and removed color information - nothing seems to work. The images I'm using are 640x480 photographs of a head that I'm using for modeling reference. The largest file size I used was about 300K, the smallest was about 18K.

One test I ran was to map the image onto a plane and use that as a pseudo image plane. That worked fine, except that I can't keep that plane in shaded mode while working in wireframe ... (can I?)

Sorry to ramble, but I wanted to avoid getting responses I've already tried ... any thoughts?

Thanks

David

[gmask]

Othe rpeopel have reported the same problem on desktop systems. One possible solution is to make the image square.. either by cropping or padding. Personally I don't like to use image planes and have taken to making a plane and placing a texture on it and then puttin git in a layer and making it a reference so that I can't click on it. The benefits being that the scale remains the same no matter what you do with the cameras and it seems to perform better.

[gfx-1]

I am looking to purchace a laptop to run Maya. Any info about your laptop would be appreciated (ie. model, price, where you purchaced, likes and dislikes, suggestions, ...) . Thank you.

[brainpower]

i just bought a refurbished dell inspiron 8200 direct from dell, i got a 1.8 p4, 512MB RAM a geforce4 440 go with 64MB and a 40GB 5400rpm (best available laptop speed) hd with dvd for 2300 dollars, so far its great no probles with heavy geometry, animation, loading textures,... the only weak aspect is one all laptops suffer from is slow disk acces.
and actually all you geforce buffs out there i have a question,.. this is my first machine with an nvidia card in it, i know theres a whole method of "soft quadro" 'ing geforces into quadros, which would essentially make this an M50 mobile workstation (same machine with quadro 4 instead of geforce 4 and a grand cheaper). does anyone know of a good recource for doing this to a laptop? im deffinatley not willing to open it up and solder transistors,.. but if anyone has tried soft quadroing a mobile geforce4 id love to know how it went. any probs, bennefits etc.

cheers