"This Laptop" and Ableton live

[suhler]

Hey everyone,

My old macbook pro just gave up and since the macbook pro 15' 2016 presumably won`t be released until after June I`m looking for a transitional solution. Hence I don`t want to spend too much, but still be able to use Ableton live at a reasonable level.

What do you guys think of this laptop here:

http://www.interdiscount.ch/idshop/prod ... detail.jsf


Will the power of 16 gb RAM make up for the shabby processor and slow harddrive?

[Guillermo Barrancos]

The CPU is fine and the RAM is fine.

What is not fine, is the 5400 RPM harddrive. Can't believe they still put them in these days. /sigh

Unless you only use hardware synths, you going to get some trouble with VST's with large patches and huge Libraries.

All decent Laptops these days have an SSD drive, but as absolute minimum (if SSD is beyond your budget) would be a 7200 RPM harddrive.

Just as an example, my old macbook pro from 2005 had a 5400 rpm harddrive and it was terrible when using VST's like Spectrasonics Atmosphere at that time.
I can tell you it's not fun, when having to wait 10 seconds or more for loading a single patch every time and you will grow frustrated when cycling through your Library looking for a sound With these kind of wait times.

A lot of the new Native Instrument stuff, some of these have patches in the size of 200-300 MB and if it's a crappy slow 5400 rpm harddrive, load times will be 20-30 seconds for each patch!
Fun times, when you have a large project With lots of tracks filled with these kind of VST patches and try to open it. Sure test of your patience.

Your OS and boot times will be slow too, with just an 5400 rpm disk.

[suhler]

Thanks for your input. Yeah, I suppose 5400 RPM really is terrible. I`ve operated with a 7200 RPM harddrive up until now and even with this loading times were a disaster.

Well I guess I`m stuck with my desktop then until the new MBPs are released I surely won`t buy an outdated MBP and every acceptable transitional solution is too expensive to buy just for a couple of months.

[beatz01]

Buy a used Lenovo Thinkpad T410 with an i5 M520 processor, 8 GB RAM and replace the hard drive with a SSD.Should cost you around $200-$250.

[Guillermo Barrancos]

Thanks for your input. Yeah, I suppose 5400 RPM really is terrible. I`ve operated with a 7200 RPM harddrive up until now and even with this loading times were a disaster.

Well I guess I`m stuck with my desktop then until the new MBPs are released I surely won`t buy an outdated MBP and every acceptable transitional solution is too expensive to buy just for a couple of months.

If you can get last year MBP for a good price go for it. The skylake CPU aren't a revolution. It's only incremental.

I now have early 2013 MBP With Core i7, 8GB of RAM and 512GB SSD and runs all the latest software perfectly fine.