Toshiba Laptops -

neomodo · Post by **neomodo** » Sun Aug 28, 2005 9:13 am

I guess this is another klaptop thread.

I have noticed that several people use Toshiba laptops for audio stuff. I have a Satellite Pro M10 Centrino 1.5 mhz 512 RAM and a Tecra 9100 P4 M 2.0 ghz 512 RAM

Just wiped and reinstalled the Tecra and installed my mbox drivers (no Pro Tools just the ASIO drivers) Live 5, Reason, Korg Legacy collection, some guitar plugins, Waves, TRacks and I forget what else.

Sadly, the machine was crawling as I worked on a tune. It had 2 mdi tracks using Korg Wavestation, Reason rewired in another track with a combinator consisting of 3 samplers a synth and a redrum, 3 guitar tracks - a 16 measure loop and it was just too much. I'm sure that putting a full gb of ram will make a big difference but other than that... I will try on the Satellite pro when it gets back from the shop. It is a slower mhz speed but I believe the Centrino is more efficient and performs better than the P4 M cpu so they might be comparable. When all is said and done... Don't have a lot of time or money so only one of them will get the RAM upgrade..

I would like to hear of others' Toshiba experiences and any recommendations are also welcome.'

thanks

rikhyray · Post by **rikhyray** » Sun Aug 28, 2005 11:28 am

I dont think it is Toshiba problem. Korg is CPU hungry. Specially the cell. On my old 2.8 P4 Vaio I was usually doing the legacy track then when ready rendering to audio , sometimes it was not even possible to record in real time , so rendering was the solution. WS is not so heavy but still you have some rewired stuff too.

neomodo · Post by **neomodo** » Sun Aug 28, 2005 1:11 pm

that's what i usually do too - sometimes I do it at the same time as recording the midi track if i have the part down fairly well. Even without the korg stuff it seems this Tecra won't fare so well at least until I have a gig of ram and also use an external firewire drive for audio. I suspect that's some of my performance hit too...

I was working with this machine with absolutely every service known to man turned off ( the expendible ones that is)

You know and I don't really know how much of this is related to the mbox too - the only other option is to use the built in yamaha card but then the latency was so bad that I couldn't even compensate in my head - any adjusting there and it started sounding like early einsturzende neubaten - only the tune I was working on was a carpenter's cover - (ok so that's a joke but you get my point )

but my question still remains - The TECRA 2ghz peintium4 M at 2.0ghz or the Satellite Pro 1.5 ghz centrino. I guess I need to go get some specs to compare the M vs. the centrino. If they are comparable I'm thinking the 15" screen of the Satellite takes it...

davy · Post by **davy** » Sun Aug 28, 2005 1:36 pm

Have you set the engergy properties to "always on"?

Control Panel - Power options --> set powerscheme to "always on"

A lot of people still don't know this. Performance increase is huge.

rikhyray · Post by **rikhyray** » Sun Aug 28, 2005 4:50 pm

Oh, if you dont have at least 1 G Ram and you use internal sound card.... everything is OK, I mean normal that it is not working. Even with my old 2.8 P4 I had the 1 G RAM, Indigo but korg cell would choke it.

Definitely centrino, 2.0 P4 M ? forget about it. 1.5 centrino should perform at least like 3.2 P4, I am talking music here, Live specific, somehow centrino work better for us the Intels official calculations, I didnt bother why, just got of P4 and got centrino.

neomodo · Post by **neomodo** » Sun Aug 28, 2005 6:30 pm

when it comes to tweaking systems I've got that down to an art - Not only do I do that for a living, I happen to be one of the many unfortunate souls that bougt a Digidesign product making sure that my hardware was compatible with it 100% but it ran like shit - still does. In the process I dug deep into my desktop system and have created a profile that is using nothing...

The spooler service is a hog too
PIO mode on disk drives big hog
and strictly speaking defragging audio drives also not advised - instead copy everything out and reformat...copy back in
what else... um using a gazillion 9 gb partitions instead of big ones
using a separate audio drive...

the list goes on...When it works ProTools on Windowsa seems to outperform it on a MAC - however When I have run it on my G4 - all I can say is the byatch is stable - I'll take slow over stable any day... Haven't run Live on MAC does it perform better or worse?