Emu XL-7 & MP-7 User's Group

To be honest, you really can't just go by the brand name when choosing 
laptops for music.  You'll find that there's really only a few 
manufacturers making laptop, and all the big name companies buy these and 
simple slap their names on them, maybe change a few small parts.  Knowing 
this,  you can sometimes find the exact same physical laptop being sold by 
different manufacturers.  They'll have different model numbers of course, 
but if you look at the cases and specs, probably identical.

You're going to have to spend a lot of time researching this one, getting 
the wrong laptop can mean having all sorts of unsolveable audio issues, 
much more so than with desktops.  An unlike desktops, most of the time you 
can't replace the component that's giving you issues.  Here's some things 
I would look for:

- NO SHARED GRAPHICS MEMORY!!!  This is big one, and can really eat into 
your laptops performance.  The laptop should have a dedicated graphics 
card and memory, at least 32MB.  A lot of times you'll find a deal on a 
Laptop with a fast CPU, but it means nothing if the CPU has to dedicated a 
lot of it's resources to the graphics side of things.
- 512MB RAM.  If you can get it included with the laptop, great, if not, 
plan on adding this asap.
- Battery life.  This may or may not be important to you, but I bet if you 
get a laptop you're going to want to make music while out and about (it's 
fun as hell).  In "general" Athon based CPUs will have shorter battery 
life than other CPUs, particularly the Intel Centrino systems.  I'm a big 
proponent of Athlon's for desktops, but comparing the battery life of 
those in laptops versus the Intels, I decided to get a Centrino based 
system (1.5gHz).  These are geared towards preserving battery life, I can 
use Reason for about 3.5 - 4 hours, or run Live with VSTi's (more CPU 
intensive) for about 3 hours.
- Hard drive speed. If you're mostly doing midi work, and 4200RPM drive 
will be fine, but if you plan on doing any audio work, try to find a 
5400RPM drive.
- Screen size and RESOLUTION.  Bigger screens are not always better, so be 
sure to check the specs!  A big screen with low resolution kinda of misses 
the point, and this is another one of those things that gets hidden in the 
fine print sometimes.  Mine is 15.4" with I believe a 1280x800 resolution, 
though I'm going by memory so that could be wrong.  More than big enough 
for Reason, and I can see about 16 tracks in Live.
- Compatibiltiy with your soundcard of choice.  Before you buy a laptop, 
decide how many ins and outs you're going want, and choose a sound card. 
Then research to make sure that there's no known driver of chipset 
incompatibility issues you should be aware of.  I use an Echo Indigo IO 
right now, and had to deal with troubleshooting some annoying issues it 
had with the PCMCIA slots drivers in my laptop.  Luckily, Echo had a 
utility to correct the problem.

To be honest, picking a laptop for live use has been probably the hardest 
gear choice I've had to make.  There's a lot of variables to pay attention 
to, and prices can vary a lot depending where you go.  Doesn't help the 
fact that most places charge a restocking fee for returns, so if you make 
a mistake and need to return your laptop, it can cost you $250 or so as 
well. 

If it helps at all, I use a HP ZT3010US that I got at Best Buy for about 
$1200 after rebates (I got lucky, there were 4 different rebates I could 
apply towards this machine at once).  They no longer carry this laptop, 
but it has been replaced by the almost identical HP ZT3350US.  The only 
issues I've had are the above mentioned PCMCIA driver conflict, which is 
fixed now thanks to Echo tech support. 

rEalm





i thought of an Asus Notebook, always made good experiences with their 
mothers, what do you think? what brands do you recomend?

T

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