So last night I officialy decided to pull out a pretty penny and buy a laptop thats soley dedicated to recording and performing live music.

The Story: A friend's friend's girlfriend was having a huge house party with a couple bands playing and my friend and I were going to play some live electronica stuff also.

The Problem: I don't have a working laptop so I dragged my entire PC rig and Firebox (aka FP10) over which was a fucking BITCH. My friend had a Laptop and I was so fucking envious of how easy it was for him I knew it was time.

The End: My firewire interface broke and we had to cancel our set.

Anyway, here's what I'm looking for:

- Something not exceeding 2,000ish.
- NO MACS!
- 2.0G CPU +
- A gig or two of RAM
- A HD that can run anywhere from 5400 - 7200 rpm range (higher the better if price allows)
- A setup that has absolutely no no no ground-loop issues.

If you guys know of any good manufacturers or specialists that can provide the above then please give me your two cents. Also, if you have any more suggestions about things I should be looking for in my Laptop for better audio performance or any experience you'd like to share, please do!

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Man go with the new Dell Laptops for gaming their bad ass. I find that systems especially built for gaming are great at everything else. I bought one of the Desktop XPS gaming system pcs man, i couldn't have spent the money on a better system.


http://www.dell.com/content/product...s=19&l=en&s=dhs

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i loves my dell. Its a latitude -- workhorse computer, but its good.

with 2 grand, you'll be able to get everything you want, AND MORE... i feel like an infomercial

yee dell 4 t3h pwnz

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7200 would be minimum but thats not as important as the HDs cache memory. Cache is like the HDs internal memory so when info comes into the HD.. its able to store that info in its own memory.. then it writes it to the actual disk when it gets time to do that. cache is extremely important. I wouldn't worry about HD though... Ive never seen anyone do a halfway decent recording on a laptop without using an external hard drive. Honestly just get a macbook (sorry) of some kind and an external HD (will be under 2000). Pro tools is meant for it and it will be much more consistent and stable. i dont know much about live sampling from a laptop but i know consumer level voltage blows compared to pro audio... i want to say that a good soundcard will fix that but im not exactly sure.

i absolutely despise mac's as well...buttt, some macbooks are dedicated to recording music, come with all programs, and really fucking decent sound cards. For under 2000$, it'd be much easier to grab a mac

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Try these: http://www.sweetwater.com/c890--PC_Laptops

I don't know if they meet your specs exactly, but they're laptops built for recording and they're both in your price range.

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Dude, you rule persekutor! I'm going to seriously consider the MusicXPC Pro M5x.

Whats a good cache, amerok?

I also don't need to worry about a soundcard because I run sound out of my Firepod.

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An 8mb cache would be fine.

Bear in mind that even if you have a hard disc rated at 7200rpm, if you're running it off the battery, it'll only spin upto 5400 (to conserve battery). If you plug it in, it'll run at 7200, but it's not really an issue unless you're doing multitrack recording

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I have an HP. Love it. Well within and above your desired specs and under $1,000.

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Damn, really? I'll have to see how much I can design one for! I was looking at ADK laptops and they're certainly catching my eye.

Can you list your specs and where you bought it from?

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not to bash dislexic or anything, but hp has some REALLY sketchy laptops on the market. I try to avoid them as much as possible. They have a realllly high failure rate with the AMD parts in them -- and they come loaded with pointless memory hogging software 90% of the time. However, if you get one with intel components, and reformat it completely, you can avoid most of the problems associated with HP.

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Same could be said for any manufacturer. *cough*Dell*cough*

My old Sony Vaio came with so much garbage on it and ran super slow until I deleted a ton of stuff. I'm even happier with my new HP and it costed much less. It is running Intel, but AMD stuff is just as nice if not nicer.

Plus, if you buy new there is warranty that can cover EVERYTHING.

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Yo dislexic: Can you list your specs and where you bought it from?

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ouch a vaio hahahaha

amd stuff used to be nicer, but since they came out intel has stepped up their game and made alot more efficient stuff

my problem with HP is 2 of my friends bought some of those battleship huge laptops a year or so ago, both with amd chips, and the harddrive would get damaged and go wayyyy slow (1-2 hours to start up) and have write failures and other crap. When they sent it into HP on warranty, HP would either just reformat it and send it back, still full of hardware problems; or they would replace the harddrive which would get refried again in a few weeks. When i called HP on my friend Pam's behalf because they stopped taking her calls, i suggested that it was the processor thats been cooking the parts, and then they told me that all amd parts werent covered by warranty. Yeah just a bad experience, Pam switched to a Mac... it was that bad hahahahah.

My friends with the intel hp's didnt have this problem at all. Tells ya something about amd eh?

Other than that, the only other problem i have with HP laptops is how inefficient some of the media ones are, with all those crazy blinking lights and random media buttons and the software required to keep those buttons working. Takes battery power to keep those buttons connectedd to the system. But if you have it plugged in all the time like a desktop and not a mobile comptuer like me, then this wont be a problem.

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So this is where I'm at now:

Laptop ADK Q mini SR - 1,312.00
Case ADK - ADK Q mini SR: 14" WXGA (1280 x 800) Glossy LCD. TI Firewire, Embedded Inte
Processor Intel - Core 2 Duo T7500 2.2G 4meg cache 800 FSB
Memory SuperTalent - DDR2 667 1Gig Sodimm Lifetime warranty.
Memory 2 SuperTalent - DDR2 667 1Gig Sodimm Lifetime warranty.
OS/Programs Drive SEAGATE - Seagate 160GB (ST9160823AS) 7200rpm SATA2 8MB NCQ Notebook Hard Drive (2.5
DVD-RW Slim 8X DVD-RW/+RW and CD-RW Drive. Dual Layer
Operating System Microsoft - WINDOWS XP Home Edition OEM full version w/manual and keycode.
Other Software Paragon Drive Backup 8.5 Personal Edition
Warranty 1Q 3 years parts 3 years labor Lifetime support

Anyone have any experience/opinions with ADK? How does this deal sound? I also really like that it comes with XP and not Vista.

I've read a lot of good things about HPs but I can't seem to design one that fits what I want and for a good price.

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ummm... microsoft?

ya i guess

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that computer would work great for xp. If you wanted to run it smoothly on vista-- as in as smooth as with XP, you'd have to upgrade the ram to around 4 gigs and maybe the processor. Vista is a resource whore.

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