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Dec 03, 04
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laptop advice
I'm thinking of investing money into a laptop for music production...
I'm looking into a compaq presario with the following specs: Mobile AMD Athlon 64 processor 3000+ 512MB DDR SDRAM 333MHz 60GB Hard Drive 15.4" WXGA High-Definition Widescreen (1280 x 800) Display DVD-R/RW Combo Drive High-speed 56K modem and 10/100 BaseT ethernet 54g integrated 802.11 b/g wireless LAN NVIDIA GeForce 4 420 32MB graphics card JBL Pro Performance and internal speakers Weight: 14 lbs. Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition for $1599 good? bad? 
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Dec 03, 04
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i would invest in a desktop so that when u want to purchase upgrades you're making your life a lot easier. also for 1600 you can make a much better machine than what you've listed for the lap top.
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Dec 03, 04
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I just got one of those laptops for a friend of mine and it does look nice and may do the job.
But if you are doing any serious music work I would suggest a Mac as they work way more seamlessly for AV purposes. Or a desktop that you can customize and expand unless you plan to use the unit for Final Scratch or something similar.
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Dec 03, 04
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I've just heard people having real problems with the compaqs in general.
Seriously look into the iBooks though, they're great machine, finding software would be well worth the switch. You should message Leviathan (Jess) as he's got a g4 tower and may be able to hook you up with a bunch of software if you decided to make the switch.
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Dec 03, 04
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Quote:
no problem running reason, cubas etc. either
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Dec 04, 04
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i would suggest to buy wholesale, so that you can replace the broken parts yourself. talk to neoh in that regards. i got mine about a year and a half ago, and i've had no problems yet. but when something goes, i know i wont have to send the whole thing in, just go out and buy the part. if you go with hp or compaq, or that type of thing, you have to pay to send the hwole thing in, theres no customer replacaable parts. and yeah, i did tech support for hp, which is now the same thing as compaq, and i still have nightmares.
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Dec 04, 04
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WXGA 1280x800 for a 15.4" screen I find is quite low-resolution. OK for general purpose stuff.
If you're gonna use it for music production where the programs display a lot of information, you might want more pixels. Check out say a Dell XPS - they have a 15.4" screen but it comes with a WUXGA 1920x1200 screen. They previously had an intermediate resolution WSXGA+ but it seems no longer available on that model, you can still get it on other Dells. They previously had a less macho version of the XPS called the 9100 but that was dropped. The XPS is really a gaming system/ultimate desktop replacement, has a built-in subwoofer that could be useful for music stuff, 100 GB HD, 128 Mb video card etc. I use a Toshiba with a 15" 1400x1050 screen, now discontinued but similar to Dell 5160.
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Dec 04, 04
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most important aspects I can see affecting you are these.
RPM speed of the hard drive -try to avoid anything lower than 5400rpm, faster is better but I know they are pricey in laptops, i found out the hard way. Desktop HD's are standard 7200 rpm. Ram -because alot of programs are loading clips into ram these days (ie: ableton, NI kontakt, Halion etc..) your going to want to punch that up, I had 512mb and doubled that to be able to play on ableton properly without overloading. The larger the clip, the more ram your going to want to allocate to them. CPU Speed -not much I can say, anything over 2.0gz is great these days, but if your hard drive and ram aren't up to spec the CPU speed won't be your problem. Specialized External Sound Source - Get yourself a proper external sound card for it.. something portable, USB, PCMIA or firewire.. so you can hear everything your making and use the internal DSP of the audio card to take some load off the playback. I mean If your doing alot of recording into the laptop, the converters and pre's are very important. Low cost ones.. M-Box by digidesign is good, and a good price, it runs on protools PC and mac, it's compatible with reason (I don't use reason so don;'t quote me on that.) and abbleton and cubase I think, i know it dosnt work with logic that well though, version 5.5? M-Audio products are ok for playback I guess, but the pre's and converters are fucking junk for recording in. If you got some more $ to blow, MOTU just released a wicked portable version of the 828mkII, it powers off Firewire and is pretty sleek! Echo makes some decent portable cards that are PCMIA, the indigo and what not.. pretty handy, heard some problems about screens locking up in standby mode but thats all. Their cheap too.. like $150? or $200? As for the model and brand of compact, haven't heard anything but bad things about them. Pieces falling apart... then again my vaios do the same shit, and the powerbook i use to use broke as well. Just all in how you take care of it. Cheers, Kyle Last edited by Skyles; Dec 04, 04 at 01:53 PM.
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