Ran my BI setup for two years exactly like that because I had an idle work laptop off-lease and was in the process of moving so wanted to have some cameras operational at both houses while moving over the space of several weeks.
The main negatives (based on my experience):
- My laptop was an "Engineering" model (elitebook 8570w), with i7 but the performance is much lower on the mobile chip versus some cheaper desktop you could get today.
- If I didn't have a laptop just laying around, it would make 0 sense to buy one for this purpose, used desktop market is huge and the systems are cheap
- internally this laptop, even as large as it was (almost 7 POUNDS), could only hold 2-SSD drives.
- External enclosure plus large hard drive to store media always worked for me, but reliability over the longer term would be lower (more points of failure laptop-to-enclosure, enclosure internals, plus hard drive failure risk itself)
- All-in-one, if something fails on a laptop pretty much the whole main board "requires" replacement because most of these companies don't do component level repairs (big $$)
- Killed the battery, either the constant charge/discharge or maybe just because it was 3 years old, but the battery won't run the laptop for 10 seconds....total deadsville.
- Lack of Dual-NIC which was my personal preference for segregating the cameras from the network, so I added a USB ethernet adapter which worked fine.
It did have a built in screen, and the battery did act as makeshift UPS a couple times, those were the only positives over two full years. I wouldn't recommend it for anything more than exploratory testing of "hey am I interested in this BI software", nothing long-term.
