Choosing a Laptop to run Live

[lapieuvre]

The most important things:

7200 RPM hard drive
firewire ports
Strongest processor you can afford
maximum RAM

Mac or PC doesn't matter aymore

[simpleton]

The most important thing, get one that will accommodate dual internal HDD's. This pretty much limits you to the HP 17" line (and I think some Toshibas or Dells can too). I have an older Pavillion and have 1 terabyte of internal (7200 rpm, 16 MB cache) disk space. Try doing that on a Mac.
The next thing is make sure the firewire and/or PCI express port has a TI chipset. I got a TI chipset on my express card slot. Just got lucky with that. I stuck a Indigo IOx in there and it kicks ass. My firewire port is a crappy Ricoh but I dont use it anyhow so I disabled it... along with all the other Vista eye candy. I have a hard time getting Live to crash, even 8.1.3

[McQ714]

The most important things:

7200 RPM hard drive
firewire ports
Strongest processor you can afford
maximum RAM

Mac or PC doesn't matter aymore

it does matter when you are talking about getting the best you can for your money! you can get a quad core i7 PC laptop for about the same price, if not less, than a dual core i7 macbook pro.

choose wisely grasshopper...

[#1thelark]

You can get 1TB laptop hdds nowadays. That should be enough.

[simpleton]

You can get 1TB laptop hdds nowadays. That should be enough.

Nevertheless, I still prefer to keep my sets/samples/data streaming from a secondary HDD and my program files on the primary HDD. A Seagate Momentus 500 GB HDD will set you back $79. How much do the terabyte drives cost?

[prof_lofi]

Do any of you guys run your samples off of a firewire drive? Sorry, I know it's off the post topic but you sound like you might know about this...can't get a consistent response elsewhere on the forum...just need some more space and the only way on this clevo is to firewire it...any thoughts?

Bill

[mattmcook]

just found this laptop (more in my feeble price range - sorry no macs )
http://uk.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=RZGwDN2NnWZ7NhbH

i know i could always get better, but for this price, what do you lot think?
do the job with Live?
It has a thing called Sonic Master which apparently gives it better sounding sound; know idea what it exactly is.
Its apparently "designed for audiophiles"

oh and i'm thinking of getting it with either a 7200RPM hard drive or a 7200RPM external HDD instead as advised by one of y'all above.
if its external, will it still be ok to keep the songs/samples on itand have Live access it from there?

[3dot...]

I like HP and Lenovo for laptops... hp has better support imo

[epjl2000]

matt, what platform are you using now? Windows?

And what else do you expect to do with the laptop?

[mattmcook]

At the moment I'm running Windows XP with Live 7 on a very old desktop - 512 RAM ~1.9GHz , you get the idea!

I'll be doing standard UNI work on it, word documents etc and internet but mainly looking for a good one so I can continue to write songs and DJ (just starting.) At the moment my computer pretty much CPU Overloads on about 4 audio/midi tracks with effects, ideally I'd rather it didnt :p

thanks

(found a better link to the laptop I'm looking at: http://uk.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=RZGwDN2NnWZ7NhbH )

[mattmcook]

I'm now leaning more towards this laptop, just scouring the internet for a any posts about sound card problems with it :/

[mattmcook]

anyone heard of this laptop?
http://www.dv247.com/synergy/buy/portman-pw100/

said to be created especially for DJ'ing and audio production.
2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Intel PM45 Chipset
4GB DDR3 RAM (1066)
250GB Fast Hard Drive (7200RPM)
Windows 7 Professional 32

its listed as only having Windows 7 x32, wont i need x64 to be able to use all the RAM available?

[glenn303]

anyone heard of this laptop?
http://www.dv247.com/synergy/buy/portman-pw100/

said to be created especially for DJ'ing and audio production.
2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Intel PM45 Chipset
4GB DDR3 RAM (1066)
250GB Fast Hard Drive (7200RPM)
Windows 7 Professional 32

its listed as only having Windows 7 x32, wont i need x64 to be able to use all the RAM available?

Live is only 32bit.

[prof_lofi]

and yeah, with 32 you can only use 3 gig ram, but my understanding is you need both modules (each 2 gig) to access that...I could be wrong though, but that's the situation I'm in with my laptop, 4 gig installed, 3 gig usable.

bill

[mattmcook]

Ah right ok, I understand the use for only x32 but you'd think they may as well put in x64 for other apps that might need it.

Also, prof_lofi, would you mind telling me what your laptop is that you run Live on?