Ableton Forum

Hello,

Ive been reading recently that some laptops are substantially better than other for production and wanted to see if anyone could offer any guidance-

Obviously the followings things are musts-

Quick processor, dual core etc
high DDRam 2000-4000 preferably
large hard drive (altho external will solves this prob)
various slots,
plenty of USB's
Firewire



okay thats just a quick rundown of what i know is necessary.

Basically I have friend who works in IT for a big bank, he is currently buying 250 IBM laptops and can get me a

Thinkpad T60 for a very reasonable price with:
2.16 GHz Dual Core
4000 Ram
100 gig HArd Drive
15.4 Inch widescreen
ATI Graphics
3 USB
Soundmax integrated HD Sound (still gonna need external I know)
No Firewire but does have PCMCIA slot for adapter

well thats about it.

For my budget its a great machine at an extremely low price but I am just wondering is there any issues I need to consider with the thinkpad range before dishing out so much cash!!!!


Thanks in advance crew

Do you know what soundcard you're going to get? I would suggest checking to make sure that any card you want is known to work well with that laptop, otherwise you should be fine.

cool,

thanks will do

Tarekith wrote:Do you know what soundcard you're going to get? I would suggest checking to make sure that any card you want is known to work well with that laptop, otherwise you should be fine.

Absolutely, that is the most important. PCMCIA have lots of advantages and RME; EMU and Indigo are great value for money too. Still if you could check before you buy , better.

sweet..

will do

under windows there are sometimes issues when using
more than 3 gb of ram (windows xp recognizes only 3 gb)
maybe someone has more information on this?

Try to get it with XP installed instead of vista. You can then dual boot vista afterwards, but cannot dualboot xp over vista.

I say this as I have just purchased a laptop that cam with vista and my ASIO soundcard has huge latencies and I have yet to find any card that suits my needs (multiple ins/outs at least 4/4) that has vista drivers.

Indigo has already Vista driver, EMU you must wait , RME no idea.

What's the hard drive speed?

If you are getting a good price on the IBM I guess you will probably go with that - I love Apple though, and therefore would suggest the Macbook Pro as being a super sweet laptop for 'production' (of any kind of media). OS X is a great operating system, and there is a new version (Leopard) due very soon which I reckon will be far better than Vista. Doesn't matter anyway because you can run Windows on it as well if you really want to.

It fits the criteria that you listed, and they look and feel amazing - the price tag can be a bit of an issue though... It's not as bad as it used to be. I think it's totally worth it.