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[csimon]

I was thinking of a small PC (like a Zotac Zbox) but these sort of things have the inconvenience of no keyboard or screen!

I'm not familiar with laptops at all, but just wondering if they are "good enough".

For example, would the current range of Toshiba Satellites be OK to run MC as a DLNA server, transcoding audio if necessary. I don't require video transcoding at the moment, but it would be also nice to have opinions on whether they could do video transcoding too.

Alsom, it might be a silly question but as I'm not familiar with laptops I'll ask anyway! Do laptops always sleep when you close the lid or can they be configured to stay awake and just switch the screen off?  Or alternativaly, can you keeop the lid open to keep it awake but turn the screen off manually?

[bob]

I was thinking of a small PC (like a Zotac Zbox) but these sort of things have the inconvenience of no keyboard or screen!

I'm not familiar with laptops at all, but just wondering if they are "good enough".

For example, would the current range of Toshiba Satellites be OK to run MC as a DLNA server, transcoding audio if necessary. I don't require video transcoding at the moment, but it would be also nice to have opinions on whether they could do video transcoding too.

Alsom, it might be a silly question but as I'm not familiar with laptops I'll ask anyway! Do laptops always sleep when you close the lid or can they be configured to stay awake and just switch the screen off?  Or alternativaly, can you keeop the lid open to keep it awake but turn the screen off manually?

For current transcoding settings, the highest res formats require a fair amount of CPU. My 4 core desktop (old core 2 chip) can't quit keep up to the highest res transcode. The 480p and below resolutions would probably work on any recent laptop (with better than an atom chipset) and 2 or more cores.

There shouldn't be any issues with anything other that the video transcoding.

Not sure about the laptops since I don't have one but I'd think you could make it never sleep even if the lid is closed (though it may depend on bios settings, not just windows settings). Perhaps a laptop person could comment here??
 

[csimon]

Great, thankyou.  I'm looking at a Core i5 (mobile) laptop actually, so should be more than enough for transcoding audio!