PTLE 8 on a Windows 7 laptop?

[howie b]

Hi -- home studio hobbyist here. My current rig is an original mbox plugged into a Dell desktop with two internal disc drives and 2 GB of RAM, running PTLE 6.4 on Windows XP SP3. It's not pretty, but it does what I need it to do.

I just purchased an HP 4530s laptop with an i3 processor (2.3 GHz) and 4 GB of RAM, running Windows 7 Professional SP1. It has both USB2 and USB3 ports, no firewire. According to the compatibility tables, this system might be able to run ptle 8.0.5 with an mbox 2 and a qualified external hard drive (oxford chip, 7200 rpm).

Does anybody know:

1. Will ptle 8 work with this particular hardware configuration?

2. More importantly, are the constipated USB transfer rates in Windows 7 going to be able to deal with the torrent of pro tools data? It takes me 7 minutes to transfer a 2 GB file to/from a thumb drive in Windows 7; about a minute on my wife's 2-year-old mac.

Thanks for your help, as always.

[albee1952]

LE 8.0.5 will run on Windows 7, but you are correct that the old Mbox will need to go away. With Windows 7, firewire drives are NOT supported, but USB2 is(the jury is still out on USB3, but I would think it would be okay).

As for "will it work?" can't say without a Sandra report, but a few bits to consider: i3 is a budget cpu and you really want power(so don't expect to run huge sessions) and many laptops use integrated graphics, which are often a show stopper for PT