Hey computer guys, I need help with lap top purchase.

[Biggsly]

I am looking to buy my son a laptop for Christmas. All he wants is something simple that he can use on the net, and run software to mix music. I see alot of laptops going for $250 new. Will these all work for basic net use? Anything I should look for?
If any of you have a cheap laptop to sell, I might be interested also.
Thanks.

 

[VitruvianDoc]

Will they work? yes. Will they be worth the money you spent? no.

My parents wouldn't listen to me and last year bought a black-friday special HP laptop for $399. Its ran great for about 2 months but quickly slowed to a snails pace. The low end hardware used in most laptops <$500 is outdated at the time of purchase and simply will not last nor keep up with the pace of technology and you'll find yourself needing to buy another within a year (just like my parents are). Many manufactures (both AMD and Intel) pump out under clocked processors and brand them in a misc manner and sell them cheap which find their way into these laptops.

However, this doesn't mean you have to go out and drop 1G on a laptop either.

Your best bet is to spend between the $500-$750 bracket.
You will want to find one that has the Core i5 processor series preferably, however Core i3 will work but will slow much faster.
2 Gigs of ram will be good, 4 gigs will be ideal.

Good brands other than the big 3 (Dell, Apple, HP) include Asus, Toshiba, and a most others as long as they use the above hardware.

 

[Perplexed]

The above advice is good, but 2GB of RAM would be skimpy. Windows 7 can run with a minimum of 1GB (on a 32-bit system) but it'd be slow, and 2GB wouldn't be much better (required with a 64-bit system). 4GB is what I'd recommend for general use.

 

[MrShooter]

The above advice is good, but 2GB of RAM would be skimpy. Windows 7 can run with a minimum of 1GB (on a 32-bit system) but it'd be slow, and 2GB wouldn't be much better (required with a 64-bit system). 4GB is what I'd recommend for general use.

I would recoomend 7,977,449GB of RAM

 

[NikatKimber]

I will kind of agree with the Doc above me.

The super cheap (sub-$300) computers that are being listed are glorified netbooks with big screens. For anything more than checking email and basic web browsing they would get very frustrating. My F-i-L has one of the $329 Toshiba laptops with the Celeron processor and 3gb of ram; it works for him, but all he does is email, web browsing, Word documents, and the occasional PowerPoint.

That said, my wife has a Toshiba with the i3 that we bought last year and is still running great. It does have 4gb of ram. I would say that is a bigger deal than the processor. She does photo editing in addition to other basic computing tasks. IMO, the i3 will still be plenty of horsepower for quite a while. I am currently shopping for a replacement for a 4 year old Toshiba that had the AMD Athlon dual core and 2gb of ram, but was still enough for what I did with it; and I consider relatively tech savvy.

HOWEVER, if your son is wanting to mix music on it, he will want at the bare minimum the i3, and 4gb of ram. I don't know how processor intensive music mixing is, but I *would* recommend the i5 based on that.

 

[JonN06]

If you just planned on web browsing a netbook or cheap laptop would be fine. The music editing is where it's going to hit you. You'll want a better laptop to work propperly, and depending on how much mixing he is doing you could be dropping a lot of cash on the mixing software.

I hate to say this as I'm a pc guy, but if he is going to be doing a lot of mixing you might want to save and look into getting a refurb MacBook pro. They have better options as far as mixing and editing software. Good luck.

 

[Grendel]

I'm a professional sound engineer, my day job full time (and about 500 hours per year of over time). I'm also a PC guy.

There are very few music editing and mixing programs that are Mac only these days. And Getting into a lower end Mac has one big distinct disadvantage over the PCs in the same price bracket, they usually only have one or two USB ports. I don't know what your sons does music wise, but he may end up using three or more USB ports and maybe a Firewire port as well. Audio interface, external hard drive, MIDI keyboard, plug-in authorization dongles, etc... Some devices can use a USB hub to maximize available ports, but others, like audio interfaces won't work on hubs and need a dedicated USB port. Plus, if he has an audio interface that requires a Firewire port, then you will need a laptop that has one of those. The low end PCs and Macs are doing away with Firewire in favor of USB 3 or Thunderbolt (of which there are currently no audio interfaces on the market that use this I/O, and may not be for at least another year).

My best advise to you is to forgo the big surprise on Christmas morning of a brand spanking new laptop all wrapped up with a bow on it. Tell your son that you want to get him a new machine and sit down with him to discuss what sort of power and i/o options he needs to do his thing. Troll the internet and look at what's available and what the options are.

I would suggest a minimum of a quad core processor, i5 or better, and a minimum of 4GB of DDR3 RAM. Any modern video card with at least 512MB of onboard RAM (not RAM shared with the CPU) should work fine as long as he isn't trying to do any real heavy video editing. The main hard drive isn't a huge concern because almost all new laptops are going to come with a hard drive in the 350 to 750 GB range these days. However, if he is going to do a bunch of audio recording, or mixing from loops, then you will absolutely want an external hard or two in the 1TB range. USB 3 or eSATA are the way to go, and make sure that they have a large cache size and run at 7200 RPMs. When you are reading and writing to the same hard drive while mixing, you want a large cache and fast access speeds to keep up with the data flow onto and off of the hard drive. The same goes if he is building songs with loops (small one or two bar snippets of music or sounds) and stringing together hundreds of different pieces of audio or sequencing pieces. This will also help to alleviate any issues should his laptop crash--his data is protected and just needs to replace the hard ware on the laptop and reinstall the programs, and his work stays in tact.

I don't know what you real budget is, but I think you are looking at $800 to $1,000 for a quality machine that will do what he needs (and twice that if you are looking at a Mac). (Actually I spent about $1,700 on my current laptop which is a Sony Vaio).

 

[Biggsly]

I'm a professional sound engineer, my day job full time (and about 500 hours per year of over time). I'm also a PC guy.

There are very few music editing and mixing programs that are Mac only these days. And Getting into a lower end Mac has one big distinct disadvantage over the PCs in the same price bracket, they usually only have one or two USB ports. I don't know what your sons does music wise, but he may end up using three or more USB ports and maybe a Firewire port as well. Audio interface, external hard drive, MIDI keyboard, plug-in authorization dongles, etc... Some devices can use a USB hub to maximize available ports, but others, like audio interfaces won't work on hubs and need a dedicated USB port. Plus, if he has an audio interface that requires a Firewire port, then you will need a laptop that has one of those. The low end PCs and Macs are doing away with Firewire in favor of USB 3 or Thunderbolt (of which there are currently no audio interfaces on the market that use this I/O, and may not be for at least another year).

My best advise to you is to forgo the big surprise on Christmas morning of a brand spanking new laptop all wrapped up with a bow on it. Tell your son that you want to get him a new machine and sit down with him to discuss what sort of power and i/o options he needs to do his thing. Troll the internet and look at what's available and what the options are.

I would suggest a minimum of a quad core processor, i5 or better, and a minimum of 4GB of DDR3 RAM. Any modern video card with at least 512MB of onboard RAM (not RAM shared with the CPU) should work fine as long as he isn't trying to do any real heavy video editing. The main hard drive isn't a huge concern because almost all new laptops are going to come with a hard drive in the 350 to 750 GB range these days. However, if he is going to do a bunch of audio recording, or mixing from loops, then you will absolutely want an external hard or two in the 1TB range. USB 3 or eSATA are the way to go, and make sure that they have a large cache size and run at 7200 RPMs. When you are reading and writing to the same hard drive while mixing, you want a large cache and fast access speeds to keep up with the data flow onto and off of the hard drive. The same goes if he is building songs with loops (small one or two bar snippets of music or sounds) and stringing together hundreds of different pieces of audio or sequencing pieces. This will also help to alleviate any issues should his laptop crash--his data is protected and just needs to replace the hard ware on the laptop and reinstall the programs, and his work stays in tact.

I don't know what you real budget is, but I think you are looking at $800 to $1,000 for a quality machine that will do what he needs (and twice that if you are looking at a Mac). (Actually I spent about $1,700 on my current laptop which is a Sony Vaio).

What kind of interface would you buy? I think I found a laptop that is going to work. He just likes to play with it.

 

[Grendel]

What kind of interface would you buy? I think I found a laptop that is going to work. He just likes to play with it.

That depends on what he wants to do. Is he a guitar player? Keyboard player? Drummer? Does he want to record vocals or more than one instrument at a time? There's all kinds of low end interfaces out there. If he's just getting started, and just wants to record himself playing guitar and singing songs that he's written or working on, then a two-channel interface would work fine. If he wants to record a whole band at the same time then you are looking for something that will record 8 channels or more at a time.

Check out the USB interfaces by Presonus. Presonus is a good company for home studio and bedroom studio equipment, have good software and support and several different interfaces at different levels and are Mac and Windows compatible. The Audio Box USB can be had for about $150. If he doesn't have headphones or a microphone yet, the Audio BOX USB Studio bundle is an ok deal, though the headphone and microphone are very low end. But the interface is decent, has two combo XLR/1/4" inputs that can be used either with microphones or directly with instruments like electric guitars and basses, has MIDI i/o so he can hook up MIDI keyboards and drum machines.

If you call Full Compass and order over the phone, you will likely get a better price than what is listed on their website.

 

[elwoodtrix]

once you know, you newegg