New laptop--what to get?

[leedsquietman]

Graphics drivers are really the cause of so much seemingly unrelated crap on windows PCs, especially Vista, that it is like an unfunny groundhog day joke.

One of the reasons we ordered the Studio 15 was because there are known issues with the mobile Nvidia graphics card (in most of Dell's other notebooks which have a card option as opposed to INtel GMA) in terms of driver performance and also overheating.

The Studio 15 has as ATI 3400 graphics card with 256MB ram and my experience has been better with ATI cards in LAPTOPS (but deffo NVidia has been better for workstations and tricked out gaming towers for me). My Inspiron 9100 still rocks with it's 128 MB ATI Radeon 9700 and that's nearly 5 years old now.

Turning off hardware acceleration is crappy for viewing video and gaming (reaallllllly crappy) but it does help me get a few % less CPU overhead when I need it, and Live is not too demanding graphically (esp in Session without extending the mixer metering) so I see more of an advantage with it than with Cubase with it's glossy GUI. I don't usually bother doing this unless I need to squeeze every last ounce out of a very heavy project though.

Disabling wifi/bluetooth and stuff is really a given, and especially antivirus and antispyware or anything non essential running as a background task. But you have to be careful deleting services as some are essential and cause a BSOD or similar nasty crash if you try and stop them. Even on Macs disabling wifi and bluetooth is a given for better performance.

The lappy just arrived this evening, so after I've played with it a bit and set up and installed Microsoft office and internet, I will let you know how I got on with it, but its very nice and quick booting up, I love 7200 rpm drives on lappies, 5400 and slower are so slow to boot and install stuff, not to mention better performance in a DAW.

[nicogrubert]

Which audio interface are you using?

The dell XPS series does not work with RME fireface because the firewire chipset of the dell does not work with RME fireface.
The dell XPS series has a Ricoh firewire chipset. As far as I know, texas instruments firewire chipsets work fine with RME firewire interface.
I don't know if any other firewire interfaces work with DELL xps.

[basstim]

@leedsquietman: how's your Studio 15 doing? Although I've heard about some latency issues with this one I am seriously considering getting one of the Studio 15s due to their tech specs. Actualls it would be sth. like yours. So how is it working? Any troubles with it? Ableton works fine? Thanks for the Info!

[TITBAG]

vaio z, windows 7 x64, echo indigo expresscard and STFU

[alexjholland]

I'm very happy with my Macbook white - great piece of kit, especially with 4Gb of RAM inside it. Will be looking at a 7200RPM hard drive next.

[gavscope]

Its $1849-, but if I hadmy time again I'd go one of these- http://www.shop-sonica.com/pd-d3100i.cfm

[trilo]

If you're getting a PC, it almost doesn't matter - you'll be replacing it in a year anyway (their shelf life gets shorter and shorter with every new release). I made the switch and grabbed a PowerBook G4 a few years ago, and never looked back. That machine lasted 3x longer (and still ran Live and other key apps) than any PC I'd ever owned, before I replaced it with a MacBook Pro 2.8GHz last fall. Sick sick machine, handles all my pro a/v apps without batting an eyelash. Real world battery life on this thing is 4 hours (I use the discrete graphics), and it weighs in at about 5 pounds. Sure I can run Windows, and I still even have a working/legal OS disc (since MS hasn't released a solid OS in 7 years) - but at this point I just don't have any interest in bothering.