Ableton Forum

Hi All,

It's been a while since I've posted here. I was in the hospital last month and when I got home found my house was robbed and along with it my studio laptop. Given it was just an old Dell Inspiron 6400 but it worked great for me and what I can't replace is all the time (years) of installing all sorts of soft synths and mostly my music. Luckly I have some backups but not of everything.

Anyway.. not playing the world's smallest violin here.. but wanted to ask what advice would you give on a replacement laptop these days? Unfortunately I haven't been following much of the tech lately and am wondering what's the latest and greatest these days? Also, does anyone reccomend a tablet PC to run Live and all sorts of other Production applications?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

I use an older Macbook Pro but some people have been reporting lockups and crashes of Live on MacOS.

The latest and greatest is:

The Top Macbook Pro (as always)

or

the Top Thinkpad T or W (as always)....

which are also pretty expensive (as always)...

Personally i use a Macbook Pro 15 Retina, bought refurbished, still hate the price but love how it works

ray619 wrote:Hi All,

It's been a while since I've posted here. I was in the hospital last month and when I got home found my house was robbed and along with it my studio laptop. Given it was just an old Dell Inspiron 6400 but it worked great for me and what I can't replace is all the time (years) of installing all sorts of soft synths and mostly my music. Luckly I have some backups but not of everything.

Anyway.. not playing the world's smallest violin here.. but wanted to ask what advice would you give on a replacement laptop these days? Unfortunately I haven't been following much of the tech lately and am wondering what's the latest and greatest these days? Also, does anyone reccomend a tablet PC to run Live and all sorts of other Production applications?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

i5 Haswell Laptop with 8GB and 1 sd drives + 1 external 7200RPM will service you well for most DAW setups. (if you are getting Apple make sure you are getting G4 Haswell i5 not the G2 i5 Sandy bridge)

For high end performance get i7 4770MQ 16GB-LOVO ram with 2 Samsung 840 pro drives if you are doing 80+ track-counts with video and mega sample libraries and aluminum cooling mat.

I appreciate the replies.. I'm planning on sticking to a win laptop. but researching some of them yesterday i noticed most of the new laptops don't come with a firewire port, which i need for my motu 896.

well.. i'll keep at it or just find my old one on ebay, which i think they're going for just about $100 now.

thx again!