Originally posted by Peter Zack Richard, Bart's Codec link (to the Pentax Imaging site) worked fine. The previews are now there. i can see a need for upgrading a 1 year old notebook sometime soon though. This is a fairly powerful unit but between Vista's memory consumption and the size of the files coming out of the K20D, things have noticeably slowed down. I'm maxed for RAM memory so it's lookin' like a bigger and faster computer is coming sooner than I thought.
I had exactly the same issues with my machines. My ageing 5 year old laptop was seriously damaged due to it being dropped and my insurance gave me a payment which was sufficient to cover a new Acer 5920 . The result was that many programs ran much faster and better on the new laptop than my main desktop (an old Sony P4 2.6GHz with 2 x 200GB SATA I drives under XP Pro)!
I decided to upgrade the laptop to 4GB of Ram and a faster, larger SATAII drive (320GB 7200 rpm) and use my old SATA drives in external e-SATA enclosures connected to the laptop via a 2 port e-SATAII cardbus card.
I use a separate 1600 x 1200 HP LP2065 calibrated monitor and use it as a dual monitor setup with the laptop screen. I also added a 1TB SATAII Samsung drive in another e-SATA external case and now use that as my main drive for all my photo editing and Raw storage, the older SATA drives are now used only for archival purposes, instead of using DVD's. The laptops 320GB drive is more than adequate for all my programs, data files and final output files for display purposes.
The system really flies along and it cost a whole pile less (under £200 for the new e-SATA cases, e-SATA cardbus card, the 1 TB external and 320GB laptop SATA II drives and an extra 2GB of Ram) than having two separate machines and I have the convenience of having laptop portability as well as desktop power and all my current working material on one computer.
I do backup my laptop main drive every 24 hours to the old 250GB laptop drive via a great copy utility (Casper 5.0) just in case my laptop gets stolen/breaks or the internal drive fails, in which case I can physically transfer the backup drive directly into the old (or replacement) machine without any of the hassle of re-installing everything.