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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