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The Water Cooler
General Discussion
Hey computer guys, I need help with lap top purchase.
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<blockquote data-quote="Grendel" data-source="post: 1664823" data-attributes="member: 15821"><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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).</p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Grendel, post: 1664823, member: 15821"] 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). [/QUOTE]
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