PC laptop (maybe Acer) for live 7 in UK?

Khazul · Post by **Khazul** » Fri Aug 22, 2008 8:35 am

My girlfriend is looking for a PC laptop to good for running Live 7 and Reason 4 - she is currently thinking of one of the Acer models most likely the 7720, (17" Acer AS7720G-703G25Hn - about £950) which is available with a 1920x1200 display and has a firewire port.

Does anyone know which firewire chipset is used in this - is it a TI one?

Any other suggestions (not a mac!) with decent size display and a TI firewire port at similar price - ie upto 1K in the UK?

thanks

Khazul · Post by **Khazul** » Fri Aug 22, 2008 9:46 am

It was an article in SOS that put her onto Acer, apart from one of the higher end models.

continuum · Post by **continuum** » Fri Aug 22, 2008 10:25 am

I've got an Acer Travelmate 8200 and it's absolutely excellent for Live. Nice big widescreen too. You should be able to pick up a laptop of similar spec for your budget as I got mine a couple of years ago for QUITE A LOT OF MONEY:)

Not sure about the firewire chipset though - I use an Echo Indigo IO PCMCIA soundcard.
(It's quite buzzy and I have to either run off battery or use a DI box.)

Rave wrote:I hope Acer have improved from a couple of years ago. Ableton 5 ran really badly on it. Live 7 is a hungry beast.

Yeah but this doesn't mention the spec of the laptop does it? maybe it's got a slow CPU or slow HD or something. It's not like you can rubbish Acer laptops just because you bought a slow one is it?

[EDIT]

Just checked the spec of the acer 7220 mentioned by the OP - it completely outclasses my 3 year old acer, and that eats Live for breakfast.

Silwolffe · Post by **Silwolffe** » Fri Aug 22, 2008 11:17 am

Hey, I did a quick search on the Acer model you mentioned, and I came up with quite a few different hardware specifications. Could you list the actual hardware specs the machine will be sporting that your girlfriend wants?

If you're still looking, I would suggest taking a look at rain-recording, since you seem to want to be hitting up with a windows operating system.

http://rainrecording.co.uk/products/livebook/

The models come in either a 2.1ghz or 2.5ghz intel-based dual core processor, and they both seem to be within your price range.

I hope this helps.

Khazul · Post by **Khazul** » Fri Aug 22, 2008 7:28 pm

Thanks all - Its this one that shes after:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=722141

Im just trying to check it out before she buys it

Silwolffe · Post by **Silwolffe** » Fri Aug 22, 2008 8:43 pm

Okay, so it seems to have a 4-pin firewire port - I'm no firewire genius, but I don't think there's any external firewire audio interfaces that support 4-pin (a lot are 6-pin). 4-pin is usually used for stuff such as digital cameras, camcorders, .etc.

You would probably just have to go the USB route instead of Firewire for an external audio interface.

It seems like a good machine, though it doesn't state (or I don't see) if there is a 5,400 or 7,200rpm hard-drive built in. I'm going to assume that it's a 5,400. Depending on how hard your girl wants to push it, this may be a problem with audio drop-outs (or extended audio latency when audio loops are read from the HD). The processor may be able to compensate for it, though.

It also comes with windows vista, so that may cause a problem here or there with drivers and software stability (it has for me and I have since downgraded back to XP Pro).

Other than that, it seems like it would run live without a hickup. Here's hoping.

duluxdog · Post by **duluxdog** » Fri Aug 22, 2008 9:00 pm

1k is serious money. I bought an Acer 5520 Travelmate. It had C2D, 2.2 ghz, 2GB RAM. It didn't run Live very well. I bought a Macbook Pro in the end (I KNOW - not what you want hear).

There are some good Windows boxes out there. My money would be on Dell or Sony.

You should be able to find one of these in 17" and less than what PC World charge.

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/store/ ... egory_oid=

Those are supposed to be slick machines.

aburgener · Post by **aburgener** » Fri Aug 22, 2008 9:04 pm

Silwolffe wrote:Okay, so it seems to have a 4-pin firewire port - I'm no firewire genius, but I don't think there's any external firewire audio interfaces that support 4-pin (a lot are 6-pin). 4-pin is usually used for stuff such as digital cameras, camcorders, .etc.

You would probably just have to go the USB route instead of Firewire for an external audio interface.

It seems like a good machine, though it doesn't state (or I don't see) if there is a 5,400 or 7,200rpm hard-drive built in. I'm going to assume that it's a 5,400. Depending on how hard your girl wants to push it, this may be a problem with audio drop-outs (or extended audio latency when audio loops are read from the HD). The processor may be able to compensate for it, though.

It also comes with windows vista, so that may cause a problem here or there with drivers and software stability (it has for me and I have since downgraded back to XP Pro).

Other than that, it seems like it would run live without a hickup. Here's hoping.

i'm pretty sure you just lose the ability to run it bus-powered. otherwise 4-pin is the same as whatever the other one is (6 pin?)

you'd just have to use an external power cord with the sound card

correct me if i'm wrong though...

duluxdog · Post by **duluxdog** » Fri Aug 22, 2008 9:29 pm

This box looks like a good deal. Good specs, 16.4" screen, 3gb RAM, C2D 2.26 ghz, nice design.

http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.204-4358.aspx

http://direct.tesco.com/product/images/ ... 352604.jpg

Khazul · Post by **Khazul** » Fri Aug 22, 2008 11:41 pm

Vista aint a problem - I can sort her out with XP if needed (I have an XP license available).

Drives in them are usually 5400 - again - for the kind of stuff she is likely to be doing in live and reason - not a big deal - can memory fix samples if needed - shes not DJing off it - I have a much more powerful laptop for that and same for anything really demanding we have a decent audio workstation here as well.

Its the firewire chipset Im most intersted in finding out about - ie if anyone knows if its TI or not. As for rest of the chipset in it, but so many time ive come across laptops that look good on paper but are crap in practice for audio.

revA · Post by **revA** » Sat Aug 23, 2008 6:01 am

i have bought an acer travelmate 7720G-702 about half a year ago, and am very happy with it. i would recommend the travelmate series over the aspire, since its more rugged build, and also has the TI-FW chipset, at least my model, and i think the 5520 too, but not shure of that. some sony vaio models also have the TI chipset.
the laptop came with vista installed, and i had no problems with that either. the only downside of this model is thats it seems to be the largest 17" laptop in the market, so its not that easy to find a bag. it will not fit into the cool crumpler bags

, but it comes with two build in 250 gig harddrives.
the keyboard feels a bit wobbly, but works fine.
you should get a soundcard with it's own powersupply so the mass is not connected to the laptop, because the powersupply suffers from the groundloop noise problem (see sos pc-music forum for that)
i have a emu 1616 soundcard and can go down to 8ms latency, which sounds kind of high, but is okay for live playing, i even play my guitar through it, and it feels fine.

optimistic · Post by **optimistic** » Sat Aug 23, 2008 9:49 am

I'm running a Travelmate 5720 with Live - no problems (got mine from Oz though). Has the TI firewire chipset in it. As someone mentioned before the 4 pin is fine but you'll have to power your soundcard via mains...no big deal.

I wouldn't trust that because mine has the TI that yours definately will (I'm paraniod about these things). I don't know what the shops are like in the UK but in Oz the best thing to do was to just check out the device manager on a floor model to see what it was running.

PC laptop (maybe Acer) for live 7 in UK?

PC laptop (maybe Acer) for live 7 in UK?

Re: PC laptop (maybe Acer) for live 7 in UK?