More Laptop Questons

D

DJ Deflation

Guest
Well, Im back, for a little bit. Its been a busy summer. Im about to order a new laptop for all my music stuff, and if any of you remember, im the most computer retarded person ever. I have decided on a laptop over a PC cause I need it to be portable. Heres whats going on it (main things anyways):

Serato Scratch Life
Cubase SX3
Couple thousand mp3s
Windows XP

Whats a great laptop for under $2000 (if there is one).

Im also looking for the following capabilities:
Wireless internet
Ability to hook up second monitor and keyboard
Good sound card
Can burn CDs (an internal device hopefully)

How much memory (is that what RAM is?) should I be looking at?
What other things are important?

Sorry if this is not enough information. Just ask me if you have questions. Thanks for all the help!
 
I hope you havent bought one yet, cause if you are going to be dropping a big amount on a laptop: GET A MAC

if you are going to be primarily doing audio production on this laptop then GET A MAC

PC's ****ing suck nuts man, I made the mistake and got a PC laptop. Its slow as hell and seems to hate every audio software I run on it.

Do yourself a favor, do some research on macs, and buy a mac. G4's are gangster as hell, but they are very pricey.
 
the best PC LAPTOP under $2000 i would have to say is the Acer Ferrari my dad just bought one and its survived all the tests ive thrown at it....including Prime95(multiple instances)

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1097016&CatId=216 (this is the cheaper one)

but if your willing to spend a little bit more cash like $200 more.. then get the one my dad got,..

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1459848&CatId=1348
i would suggest a mac but i dont thin mac support alot of the Music Software i could be wrong,but i tend to stick with pc then dualboot something else.
 
Hello there,
I am going to jump right out of the MAC/PC thing and can only tell you my personal experience/setup

I have a Fujitsu Amilo Portable with:
Pentium 4, 3.2 Ghz
1GB Ram
80Gb Hard Drive
DVD-CD Recorder
External LaCie HD USB 250GB
Wireless Internet
Sound Card:ESI Gigaport AG 4Stereo Channels USB external

running:
Ableton Live
Traktor
Reaktor
Nuendo
PD
Oxygen 8 Keyboard

I have been using it for the last year - i DJ or make live acts almost every weekend - and use it on a daily basis and it never failed me.

The only thing extra i bought was a ventilator support (around €50) to cool the processor to get me through the afternoon after hours this summer in Ibiza.

Hope this helps,
cheers,
nanospeed
 
I would recommend at least going with a p4 or a 64 amd or mac, it all depends on what your using it for if your only useing it for audio well then I would say mac but then I don't know anything about them. I would go about a gig of memmory and well the hard drive it really depends on what you think you will fill up. I have a DJ ECHO pc sound card and it workks well. they are betwen $175 and $200 and are very portable otherwise there are some other sound cards that connect USB. Most new laptops will come with wireless internet at least PC's will, don't know anything about Mac's. I know vaio's are good laptops same with tashiba's but sometimes are a little more expensive. Is there any specific screen size your looking for. Also if your going to use this strickly for Audio I would look into running a black viper on your computer. I think there may be somewhere in here that tells more specifics on that and where to find it, in a search. If you run that it will show you what type of stuff to turn off and will make your computer faster and not use stuff you don't need. I right now have a 1.4 centrino with 512 megs of ram and I have used Trakter and a few other programs for playing mp3's and it is for the most part stable but every once in a while I have has glitches, but I think with a little more memmory I wouldn't get it as much and that is why I suggest a gig of memmory. also are you gong to be doing recording, because if you are then I don't suggest that echo dj card I would then suggest something that would hook up USB and would have recording capibilites. For the most part all laptops are going to be the same other then the sound,the looks,the weight, the screens, and the biggest thing would be the warranties and customer service. A p4 in a compaq is for the most part the same thing they use in a dell. Another thing is you can always add more memmory, and sometimes it is cheaper to add memmory if you buy it on the net, but like a hard drive, it is expensive to add more later. als most new laptops have cd writers and some even come with dvd writers. I hope that helps you out, I tried answering your questions, if you have any other post them.
 
I just for some reason noticed that you want to run Cubase. Isn't Cubase a mac program or do they have it for PC's to now.
 
I'd say go for a mac. I've run final scratch on pc and mac for several years and although the pcs have performed very well they just seem to get glitches on occasion. The mac on the other hand is rock solid. If you are going to be in the balearic sun then your best bet is to get anything but a p4. You can cool it, but why take risk of it overheating mid set. 512 megs should do the trick for you but the more the better.
 
malfunkt said:
I'd say go for a mac. I've run final scratch on pc and mac for several years and although the pcs have performed very well they just seem to get glitches on occasion. The mac on the other hand is rock solid. If you are going to be in the balearic sun then your best bet is to get anything but a p4. You can cool it, but why take risk of it overheating mid set. 512 megs should do the trick for you but the more the better.
Click to expand...

the only reason i see for one to have glitches when using a PC plattform is the following: to be using a machine where you have not only your DJing software and your music but also your messenger, your mail server, your ftp server your family photos, etc etc...

again i say that I have been using a PC based platfform and i have had no problems...
 
yes running all those programs will cause glitches but a computer is not only software. I don't doubt that you have had a problem free experience on a pc but it is very much the case that one pc will behave very differently than another and with so many different brands and hardware. for examble; my dell had grounding issues, my hp lock up when the fans got going. It's not that a pc won't work, it's that you need be very careful on your choice of pc and a mac would not be a bad choice.
 
yeah, i used ground loop isolators rather than pulling the ground. But if given the choice between shocking myself or degrading the sound quality, I would choose to pick the correct laptop.
 
MAC MAC MAC MAC. I'm about to go and drop about $2200 on a 15" Powerbook G4, which is, in my opinion the perfect laptop. U can get a toned down version of the 15" for a few hundo less I believe and going to the 12" would drop the price even more.

I'd suggest looking into the G4 powerbooks apple has to offer...

www.apple.com

Stay Up,
Colin
Daft Productions, LLC
 
macs are a lot more stable to be honest!!

but i got my self a centrino cos the place i used to work for when i was configuring networks was practically givingthem away for 400 notes, 120 gig hd, gig ram,

if you went for a final scratch, the scratch amp is a sound card so you would get away with that, not sure about the serato box, i dont think it has the same out ports as the fs,

the standard notebook open GL graphics cards intergrated on the motherboard of all notebooks will allow a monitor link up and a TV out to use a tv as a monitor too!!

might be an idea to partition the hard drive with 2 copys of xp if you are not going mac, use a boot disk to access the one with fs on and you will not get any software conflicts if you do a basic install with out all the additional media player, msn, iexplorer etc,

final scratch has been fingered to have glitches on windows xp

and everyone knows that the microsoft keyboard consists of 3 buttons!!

ctrl/alt/del
 
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