Ableton Forum

At least it is clear now there won't be G5 powerbooks any time soon.

And how fast would a G5 powerbook be, anyway? Apple's powerbooks are designed for light weight and long battery life. For serious Live usage, those things are not as important as speed and power.

Plus, we don't know when Ableton will optimize Live for altivec and/or G5s. Without that, even a G5 powerbook will be a relatively overpriced and underperforming substitute for a good windows laptop.

There's an Acer Pentium M 1.4 Ghz Centrino laptop with 15.4" WXGA screen on Newegg for $890 right now. Apple can't compete with that. For the cost of a 15" Powerbook ($2000-2500 depending on options) you could buy a centrio laptop ($900), a big 20" 1600 X 1200 monitor ($800) and a mac mini ($500). Have the best of both worlds.

there are a lot of technical fallacies in your post but you seem to have already talked yourself into a PC or a PC + mac mini so i won't go into them

but in answer to the original question, worth it? depends on how strongly you feel about having the mac as your main platform. plus how many *real life* problems a today's top-spec powerbook would give you relative to the way you work in Live. if you are married to doing everything possible in real time, then the centrino (or better yet an AMD64) will probably be your better choice. if that's not really how you work all the time, or you don't mind bouncing/consolidating/resampling, the powerbook might not pose much of a problem for you.

i find that i go both ways... it's nice to have the kitchen sink running on the AMD, but then organizationally sometimes i feel better working in a few distinct pieces -- which either the mac or pc can do.

by the time the G5 pb comes out.. HP and a few other manufacturers will be shipping notebooks with AMD's new 64 bit TURION processor.

Apple (by way of IBM/Moto) usually plays the leapfrog game with Intel/AMD.... they definitely jumped over them when the G5 was originally announced. but getting it into a mobile format has taken them so long by the time it finally comes out, they will still be behind (even on altivec and 64 bit optimized apps and os's). here's to 3 more years of catch up.

I got the cheapest one of the dual g5 family. The 1,8ghz.
Still kicks ass with Live and loads of plugins. Or operators.
Pc has the power benefit. Mac has all the others
Suppose that those powerbooks have at least 1,8 or 2ghz, i would get one in a flash. If you can afford to wait. I would wait.
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drush wrote:there are a lot of technical fallacies in your post .....

ooh err missus!

You all know we love a bit of technical fallacy!

So does Julian Clary

dcs wrote: Apple's powerbooks are designed for light weight and long battery life..........

heh, sorry I had to laugh at that.

Battery life on powerbooks, atleast on mine, is quite horrendous.

Luckily most places you will be gigging will have power.

Best of luck.

smutek wrote:

dcs wrote: Apple's powerbooks are designed for light weight and long battery life..........

heh, sorry I had to laugh at that.

Battery life on powerbooks, atleast on mine, is quite horrendous.

Luckily most places you will be gigging will have power.

Best of luck.

the day you can run a laptop full power for a day on battery is when I'd be interested in how long battery life is for any of them - Personally I only use the battery for checking email when I cant be bothered getting the power supply out. I'm not sure that even if you could get a battery that good for any machine that I'd want it anyway - I really cant see where I would use a computer that required that kind of battery.

Any of the places there's no power are likely to be the last places I'd want a computer

It's strange that some people think the only edge DAW-Friendly PC Laptops have over Mac's is power/performance.

I'd like to add stability and reliability also.
Live 4 screams on my P4 3.0Ghz Dell 5150 1Gb RAM ... running Korg Legacy Collection, Arturia's ARP2600V / MoogModularV / Minimoog, all in realtime.

Regarding the comment about Mac Powerbook battery life ....

Generally battery life on all laptops degrades signficantly after around 500 discharges/charges. When I first received the Dell 5150 (purchased with an additional battery for longer trips!) I would get around 3.5 hours to 4 hours of life out of my battery (with the LCD backlight dimmed to its lowest setting). Since purchasing around September 2003 the battery life is definitely reduced - I'm lucky to get around 1 to 1.5 hours from each battery. Fact of life: I'm going to order replacement batteries.

The Dell 5150 has been a total desktop replacement for me ... a properly tweaked Windows installation without additional non-music junk installed and strictly no cracked plugins or applications = a stable, reliable, high performance system.

It would be good to see Apple get a G5 Powerbook to market so that our Mac friends can join in the fun as well.

Definitely one aspect Apple's powerbooks have over most PC laptops is cosmetics and build quality (the Dell 5150's enclosure feels creaky and fragile but like any sensitive electronic gear will serve well provided you treat it with respect). Powerbooks definitely look damn sexy and feel very solid ... but looks aren't everything are they now ?

Just my 0.02

Cheers


jasefos.

If your waiting for Apple to come out with a PB G5 your waisting precious time. The only thing to wait on from Apple that worthy is there next update 10.3.8 or Tiger OSX 10.4.

The lame ass upgrade of the powerbook line has me with no sympathy for Apple right now. I'll say it again, it doesn't seem like some huge jump in engineering to me to put a single 2.5 ghz G5 in a a 2" graphite powerbook, and sell it to those of us that could give two shits about Apple's boutique slim line fashion model accessory looks, and just would like to be able to use all of our favorite products ( I use quite a few mac only products) on the same machine.

jasefos wrote:It's strange that some people think the only edge DAW-Friendly PC Laptops have over Mac's is power/performance.

I'd like to add stability and reliability also.

agreed, alot of PC bashing has to do with "stability" or "reliability", and while yes Windows is the most vulnerable to viruses and other attacks... the XP OS itself is quite stable on its own. Most folks that say they'd never use a PC on stage haven't used Windows since the 98/ME horror days. god those times were awful. But right around the same time OSX.0 and OSX.1 were quite awful as well. Some folks are still on OS9, most didn't switch to OSX till Jaguar.

anyways... this is turning into a mac v. pc debate so before that happens.
disclaimer: use what ya want, it doesn't matter.

i know OSX (unix with a glossy front end) is so powerful, but computers are only as powerful as their weakest feature. and while Windows would be the weakest feature on most PCs, i personally don't think its even half as weak a G4 with 167mhz FSB is.

AdamJay wrote:

jasefos wrote:It's strange that some people think the only edge DAW-Friendly PC Laptops have over Mac's is power/performance.

I'd like to add stability and reliability also.

agreed, alot of PC bashing has to do with "stability" or "reliability", and while yes Windows is the most vulnerable to viruses and other attacks... the XP OS itself is quite stable on its own. Most folks that say they'd never use a PC on stage haven't used Windows since the 98/ME horror days. god those times were awful.

I set my Dell 5150 laptop's internal hard drive up to be dual boot (separate 2 x WinXP partitions) with an additional large partition for general purpose data.

I have a simple rule:

When booted in my WinXP Music partition I never connect to the net for any reason whatsoever and thus I don't get virus issues. This means there's no need for any sort of spyware no antivirus tools to be installed which will create big headaches for audio applications on my nice lean-and-mean WinXP Music partition.

When booted in my WinXP General partition I'm constantly connected to the net with Antivirus software, Anti spyware tools installed.

Dual boot partitioning is really simple to setup thanks to the partition management function inbuilt in WinXP. It's best done when you first "move in" to your new laptop/desktop since there's no worry of wasting precious software unlocks, etc.

In fact the very first thing I did when I got the Dell laptop is to nuke the preinstalled bloated WinXP installation (nice thought Dell but no thanks!), run the Windows XP setup utility, delete the single large C: partition and instead create C:, D:, E: partitions. Proceeded with Windows XP installation to C: partition. Then proceeded with Windows XP installation to D: partition (which kindly setup the boot menu automatically on C: partition). I then Ghost imaged the virgin Windows installations (WinXP-000.GHO) ... all done ...

I then renamed the WinXP partitions entries in the boot menu so they are easily distinguished (i.e. WinXP Music Workstation, WinXP General Purpose).

WinXP Music Workstation partition:
1) Carefully installed latest drivers for laptop's onboard peripherals
2) Applied Windows updates (prior to SP2!!!)
3) Ghost Imaged !
4) performed tasks listedon the Tuning Tips page of www.musicxp.net (and some other tuning tips)
5) Installed essential utility software such as WinRAR, etc, etc
6) Ghost Imaged !
7) Installed all music software requiring challenge response protection (e.g. Ableton Live, Korg Legacy Collection, etc, etc)
Ghost Imaged !
9) Installed dongle protected music applications
10) Installed all other music applications
11) Applied latest updates to all packages
12) Applied latest drivers for dongles
13) Ghost Imaged !
14) Install Soundcard + MIDI interface with latest downloaded drivers
15) Configured all Audio software properly to work with hardware installed at step 14
16) Ghost Imaged !

Now ... I have a 100% reliable Music making computer system. No matter how badly I screw it up through installing toxic updates, etc I can always return to older ghost images.

This means I never ever have to go through the boredom of reinstalling Windows again. I can return to older more virginal states of the machine to test issues I may encounter.


WARNING TO DELL LAPTOP OWNERS WHICH HAS A SYNOPTICS TOUCHPAD ..... do not install the driver for it !!!
It will make your very very fast Music computer unable to even play Reason's demo song (reporting computer too slow!!!). Quite simply if your laptops touchpad works with Windows standard inbuilt drivers then don't install touchpad drivers.


I've applied a similar approach to setting up my Mac Dual G5 2Ghz by creating DMG files of the system drive along the way.

Just thought I'd share this info in hope that it may be of use to someone looking to tame their Windows laptop into being a solid, reliable and powerful system.

cheers


jasefos

AdamJay wrote:anyways... this is turning into a mac v. pc debate so before that happens.
disclaimer: use what ya want, it doesn't matter.

Don't worry Adam, this is a lame ass update, I like macs, but the g4 line has to go! Definitely flogging a dead horse. I can't fucking believe they updated a whole .17ghz.? Wow!

Jasefos, thanx for that post, I've been mulling over the idea of creating two user accounts, or the dual boot, just wasn't exactly sure how to go about it, but seeing as you laid it out so plainly, I'll do it the moment I get home tonight

tokyojoe69 wrote:Jasefos, thanx for that post, I've been mulling over the idea of creating two user accounts, or the dual boot, just wasn't exactly sure how to go about it, but seeing as you laid it out so plainly, I'll do it the moment I get home tonight

Best to keep it separated (although many will disagree stating that using Window's inbuilt hardware profiles will achieve similar separation !!!).

Some more paranoid desktop users prefer to use physically separate drivers mounted in caddies which they slip in and out of the machine to change it's role ...

Having more than one WinXP to boot into can be a lifesaver for many reasons. There's nothing more frustrating when you've got work to do and the only solitary Windows XP boot partition you have suddenly decides to no longer start.

Multi boot partition and (Norton) Ghosting are your best friends in taming your Windows music computer.

Hope this works out for you Tokyojoe69

cheers !


jasefos