Little known fact: I crashed my first PC when I was 13 years old, after getting into my head that Windows 95 was evil and needed to be vanquished. The fear, the panic, the dread, all the consternation I felt as a child after having destroying something tremendously expensive, it all comes flooding back to me when I hit any kind of technological road bump.

Today’s pothole: multimedia horsepower. But first, some background.

When I relaunched The HotSpot in a video format last August, some of you may recall that the transition enjoyed about as smooth of a ride as an F6 Hellcat traversing the Bermuda Triangle. Why the turbulence? File sizes.

HD video recorded with the TriCaster (a device which essentially allowed for multiple video channels to be recorded at once) burnt up gigglebytes at a rate of about 50 per hour. Managing a file that size is no easy feat for most computers, but I was fortunate enough at GameSpot to have access to what I will call The Great Equalizer, a behemoth of a PC on loan from Nvidia whose exact specs defy human comprehension (this human’s, at least).

Sure, its intended purpose was to power games like Modern Warfare 3 or Battlefield 3 at max settings, with 3D, bells, and whistles in full effect—and it did so with aplomb, I might add—but I had video to cut and a deadline to hit, god damn it! So after managing to convince IT to install Adobe Premiere CS5.5 on the gaming rig, I commandeered The Great Equalizer to cut my little video show. Pretty awesome, I must say.

Circumstances have, of course, changed. I’ve been talking about this idea for a developer-centric podcast in which I have someone who makes games come on the show and walk me and a friend through what’s going on in any given game—what he or she sees with his or her expert eye. The idea is to film the show using FRAPS in a single two-hour sitting, where I stop and start the recording halfway through to give me two large-but-workable files.

Being the frugal little bastard I am, my first inclination was to scour Cragislist for a suitable machine. The scouring lasted for about three minutes before I came across a late 2009 2.2GHz Core Duo Macbook for $680. I’d heard that Macs handle multimedia like champs, but it seemed dubious that this machine could really juggle a 50 gig file with any sort of composure, so I settled on no.

I scrolled a bit more, finding nothing of interest under $5,000,000, as Macs go, before returning to the Macbook. I mean, $680 is pretty good for a laptop. I click through. “Comes with: Adobe Master Collection, Final Cut Pro, Microsoft Office.” Sweet mother of license jackpot heaven! I immediately called the guy, scarcely containing my apoplexy from the anxiety that he’d already moved the hardware. He had not.

Two hours later, I’m sitting in a Silicon Valley Starbucks, having your Standard Tech Grunt prove the CS5 edition of the Master Collection could run. Run, yes, but what I failed to ask him was whether the $3,000 or so worth of software on this $680 laptop was legit. When I got the machine back to my house, the answer became fairly obvious. At this point, I’m pretty sure all the software is cracked, and I’m pretty sure this constitutes my first ethical dilemma as a small business owner.

Oh, and to get to the point of this story, not only did the Mac have absolutely no idea what to do with the .mts file my Sony HD cam spit out, but it also devolved into a twitchy mess trying to wrap its head around a 10 minute clip when I, after childhood trauma-conjuring pains, converted the file to an extension it could understand.

Needless to say, Macs are out. Laptops are out. Pirated software is out. This dude is in, as is Adobe’s wholly affordable one-year Premiere CS6 subscription plan.