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Laptop for mixing

hi i want sell my computer (desktop) and i want get a laptop for practice mi mixing and make music ...wich laptop is good i dont have too much money (1000,1200) i saw the Dell INspiron 5100 for 1000 or the Emachines laptop... well i need space in my room so... i want sell my stuff also i want a small speakers and too strong i saww the Logitech zr400 i think.. is 5.1 and 400 watts please help with that...

another question...
can i mix with computer speakers??

thanks

Re: Laptop for mixing

quote:

Originally posted by lokus another question... can i mix with computer speakers?? thanks

i do in my bedroom.

Well emachines, I don't think so. They are normally designed for webbrowsing and ofiice aplications. What you need is memory!!!; as in get at least 512MB. If you wanna create music you'll need some processing power, but not that much; around 2GHz or G4 is way enough. You can forget about video cards, resolution, battery life (if you'll mostly be in your room) and other extras which crank up the price.

PC speakers always suck. Good speakers connected to the laptop would be the option but then you'd need a good audio card, which laptops always lack (thus copnsider the price of an additional one)

I spent much time when choosing mine so if anything holler

quote:

Originally posted by don_q If you wanna create music you'll need some processing power, but not that much; around 2GHz or G4is way enough. You can forget about video cards, resolution, battery life (if you'll mostly be in your room) and other extras which crank up the price. PC speakers always suck. Good speakers connected to the laptop would be the option but then you'd need a good audio card, which laptops always lack (thus copnsider the price of an additional one)

..i love my PB..panther OS is very stable.

As far as PC goes, I wasn't all to impressed by what they had to offer. Pentium processors are horrid for music! They can't handle the processing power with a shit load of programs running at once. AMD processors are amazingly powerful inside a PC. I hang out with one of the guys from Greenwave and it's amazing how well his computer runs now with the AMD and to the Pentium.

But when it comes right down to it, the three things you need are a strong processor, a lot of memory, and a great sound card.

I got a Compaq Presario 2140US, it only cost me 1300 CDN with an extended warrenty, and it works great for all the apps I run, Cubase, Reason, FL, Acid, Soundforge, it has a AMD 2200 and 512MB ram, I'll be upgrading the ram (can never have enough), and cos all laptops have crap soundcards, I'll be investing in the Indigo I/O Card, its 24bit and can play back 96Khz, plus you have good line output and an Input, which SHOULD be on all laptops but is not, but yea I got a nice little powerhouse that is portable and didn't cost much, I would highly recommend it, but when you get a laptop, format the thing and have a nice fresh OS on it, when mine came, it had a ton of problems and took about 1 minute 30 to boot up, now its all frsh, it takes about 10 seconds, its insane the difference it makes.

Check out Apple I-books. I know lots of people that use them and love them for audio/video stuff.


as for me, i use a dell inspiron8200 for mobile recording w/ soundforge, traktor, etc. It works pretty well after i replaced it's heatsink compound and installed fangui fan monitoring/control software. (when i got it from dell, they left the protective label on the heatsink pad causing it to overheat and lockup every 10-15min, it's sad dell uses slave "cheap" labor to build their crap pcs)

As for my desktop here's it's specs:

asus p4p800deluxe
2.4c overclocked to 3.1ghz
2x256mb xms3500 running dual channel
2x120GB sata raid-0, 160GB, 250GB hdds.
sony dvd+-rw, LG 16xdvd-rom
Radeon 9800PRO 128MB overclocked 412/720

quote:

Originally posted by Prodigy Child I'll be upgrading the ram (can never have enough)

actually computers CAN have enough/too much ram. If u'r not constantly using software that eats your memory, like CAD and 3dsMax and stuff, it could pretty much slow down your computer if you had too much ram. 512 should do the trick, maybe 1gig max or something, but no more, unless ur using cad or 3d programs.

quote:

Originally posted by Wildfir3 actually computers CAN have enough/too much ram. If u'r not constantly using software that eats your memory, like CAD and 3dsMax and stuff, it could pretty much slow down your computer if you had too much ram. 512 should do the trick, maybe 1gig max or something, but no more, unless ur using cad or 3d programs.

I've never heard about this, could you explain further?, this interests me, I was only realy planning on upgrading from 512mb of 2100 ram to 1gb of 2700 or 3200 if I can.

A good example of too much ram would be 98/me machines that have more than 1GB. We've experienced problems w/ customers using a older os like 98se w/ high amounts of ram. The problem, however, does not effect NT based operating systems like xp, 2000, 2003 server, etc.

quote:

SYMPTOMS If your computer has more than 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of memory (RAM), the computer may reboot continuously when you try to start Windows Millennium Edition (Me) or Windows 98. Or, when you try to install Windows Me or Windows 98 with more than 1.5 GB of RAM installed, Setup may stop responding (hang) or reboot continuously. CAUSE Windows Me and Windows 98 are not designed to handle more than 1 GB of RAM. More than 1 GB can lead to potential system instability. WORKAROUND To work around this issue, add the following line to the [386enh] section of the System.ini file: MaxPhysPage=40000 This limits the amount of physical RAM that Windows can access to 1 GB. To add this line, use the following steps: Use any text editor (such as Notepad) to open the System.ini file in the Windows folder. Add the following line in the [386Enh] section of the file: MaxPhysPage=40000 Save the file, and then restart your computer. For additional information about the MaxPhysPage entry, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 181862 Specifying Amount of RAM Available to Windows Using MaxPhysPage

Another thing Prodigy Child, what type of motherboard/chipset do you use? Some boards/chipsets won't take advantage of the aditional speed of the ram. for example, a 845E chipset only officially supports pc2100, and a via kt333 supports up to pc2700. The faster ram will probably work, but if your pc doesn't take full advantage of it why spend the extra $$$

quote:

You may think that too much RAM would make your computer extremely fast and there is no limit on how much you could put. That's where people go wrong. When the computer needs to look for constant data in RAM, addressing space comes into play. For example if you are looking for someone's house in a small street, you have a better chance of finding the right house on the small street than on the big street. The big street is what you'd get if you overload your computer with RAM. What does overloading mean? Well as the example I have stated above, it would take you longer to find the proper directions and the right house if you were walking in a big city, where there are many addresses, while on a residential area if you know the street, you could find the house faster. This is what happens when you overload it takes the computer longer to find the right address of the data.

taken from: http://www.canadiancontent.net/tech/computing/1/

quote:

Originally posted by dj chex Another thing Prodigy Child, what type of motherboard/chipset do you use? Some boards/chipsets won't take advantage of the aditional speed of the ram. for example, a 845E chipset only officially supports pc2100, and a via kt333 supports up to pc2700. The faster ram will probably work, but if your pc doesn't take full advantage of it why spend the extra $$$

Well I can't find out what motherboard I got, tried the manual and got nothing, but it did tell me I can use PC2100 Ram or up, so I take it I should be ok, dunno what motherboard they through into these laptops but it supports the AMD 2200XP CPU, oh and I got XP Pro, so I won't have any problems like you described.

EDIT: ok just saw Wildfir3s post, thanks, thats a good description, but all I use this laptop for is playing music or making music, with the occasional browsing and playing Super Nintendo games.

Wildfir3: Sense make you not. Think of a logical explination for the downsides of more ram? ok, only 4gb is addressable on 32 bit archs. So more than that is pointless unless your using 64 bit (G5, AMD65, UltraSparc, etc) but i can't see how if you have a modern os (Mac X, Linux, windoze 2k,Windoze XP) you'd have a single problem with 2 gb. Why would anybody use an old and very crippled os like 98 or me for Audio? See above mentioned modern os, in order of preference.
Try and find the same address space argument in a comp sci textbook, you wont because it's crap. Not to go into excess technical details but it will really work better with more ram, no upper limit except for the above mentioned. The paging problem is much larger than the (more or less nonexistant) address space prob. The computer only looks as far as it needs to get get free ram. So it's not like it will hunt through some big street like they describe, it's just crap. It's an address lookup function so it doens't matter how long the street is because you go to the right place first off. I use a computer quite often with 8 GB memory (and 32 cpus), i don't make music on it though. :-)

If you are producing music using samples it's very handy to have a lot of memory. More memory means less page errors (swapping out to the harddrives) which means better response time. But using good software is more important.

Look into getting a Mac, designed much better for music, stability wise and performance wise. Notice how many live performers use non-mac laptops for gigs... almost none. You can also get a bunch of good free linux apps to run on Mac OS X which is nice. Ie http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Though truthfully i couldn't afford a mac (my 650 mhz laptop was only 350 euro) but i use Linux which is a lot more efficent than windoze so it's not quite as much of a problem. I recommend a mac though.

If you get a laptop something like the griffin imic is a good buy, or other usb interfaces. The imic sounds very nice for recording sets and playback and it's only 50 euro.

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