Need new laptop. Slight/minimal needs; limited budget [Help!]

[thecontrolcentre]

I was wrong about my i5 and I'm sorry! It was the processor options within advanced power settings. The minimum and maximum processor state was set at 5%. We changed that to 100% and now the DAW works perfectly.

I'm glad to hear you got that sorted

[spendthrift2]

I was wrong about my i5 and I'm sorry! It was the processor options within advanced power settings. The minimum and maximum processor state was set at 5%. We changed that to 100% and now the DAW works perfectly.

I'm glad to hear you got that sorted

thanks

[donkey tugger]

Y Thinkbooks, Latitudes, and Elitebooks are made with much better components.

Indeed, I've had all of these in my time and never any bother (ok, I did drop a bowl of tinned fruit down a set of stairs and managed to hit and break the screen on my old Thinkpad L420 - that'll teach me to try and eat healthy stuff..) and they're easy to clean/upgrade/fix as well, given that they're 'work' laptops so need to be fixed quickly if they go wrong.

Most of the refurbed machines are from companies upgrading their staff laptops, and as such they're usually in good condition, and have usually only been used to run a few powerpoint presentations and excel spreadsheets.

[MachFront]

oops...double post due to editing error...well...user error really. Move along. Nothing to see here. Duurr.

[MachFront]

spendthrift2 and Schmidi, thanks for your input and info. Very helpful in pointing me in a certain direction. And thanks also for the link for optimizing 10, as I'm not familiar with the OS as of yet (though I usually do tweak the heck outta whatever I'm using, usually following stuff from Black Viper's site. ).

(ok, I did drop a bowl of tinned fruit down a set of stairs and managed to hit and break the screen on my old Thinkpad L420 - that'll teach me to try and eat healthy stuff..)

I....I wish you had a video of that. That sucks!

Most of the refurbed machines are from companies upgrading their staff laptops, and as such they're usually in good condition, and have usually only been used to run a few powerpoint presentations and excel spreadsheets.

Heh. That was actually something on my mind and hoping for/about, so yeah. Ha!

Thanks everyone! And cheers!

I'm just so very tired of feeling I need or have to stick mainly to super-duper-extra-low-cpu-usage VSTs, even despite Reaper being far more cpu-efficient than any other DAW I've run, I was still...kinda penned-in. That's just too much for me, despite only being a 'I'm just doing this for fun for just and only myself' kinda hobbyist, ya know?
Also, everyday browsing has been becoming a chore, with Firefox freezing up and choking on even basic and quite static sites and image search scrolling being more or less a game-ender (RAM at only 1.2 outta 4 and CPU at 50% but one core spiking floor to ceiling like some insane EKG and waiting 30 secs to one minute after clicking on one pic then going back to the image search results until I'm able to start browsing again due to said 'freezing up'), causing me to constantly close the browser, letting things 'settle down' then launching again and going about my business. It's ridiculous.
I used to love random image searches of stuff. Now I kinda dread it.

[MachFront]

I was wrong about my i5 and I'm sorry! It was the processor options within advanced power settings. The minimum and maximum processor state was set at 5%. We changed that to 100% and now the DAW works perfectly.

This made me curious as it was a thousand years ago I messed with it, so I didn't recall...so I was hopeful I might squeeze out a lil extra bit somewhere somehow (for now anyway). But, I see that on batt my min is 5% and max is 100% and plugged in (I'm usually plugged in, especially when working on music junk) is both min and max 100% so...yeah, I already tweaked that long ago. Oh, well.

It's weird. Over all these years I've tweaked and turned off and gotten rid of and...everything... and yet I still cannot help this odd feeling there has to be something else I can get rid of or shut down. But, jeeze...when you've even gone to the point of getting rid of anti-virus....! I mean, dang...what else?!?

I'm sure it doesn't help that while I'm totally comfy with opening up and cleaning out a desktop, even after watching a number of vids concerning such, I've never ever opened up this laptop and given it a solid cleaning. It's just far too fussy and involved for the likes of me.

Aaannnd then there I am, watching vids of folks making full tracks with just and only, say, a Juno 106 and using "a little bit of reverb and delay" and/or using an older tablet or phone and some lil all-in-one studio like Caustic 3 and making great sounding complete stuff and I'm all: "Why am I bothering with this stuff?!? We ALL have, for free, far more at our finger-tips than Numan had for his first couple of solo albums!"
Sheesh. Gimmie just the ability to make simple, z-grade 80s sci-fi score kinda stuff without bouncing this or that and I'm pretty well satisfied. lol
Ah, the agony and the ecstasy. Heh.
This calls for another Rum & Coke (as usual).

[Schmidi]

Mach, it's the components!!! (Trying to help, not insult you) That was a budget laptop years ago. That CPU has almost zero cache, and that is a huge factor in music app performance (despite AMD using cache differently to Intel).

Grab one of the previously suggested laptops off eBay and start enjoying life!!

[chk071]

Personally, i'd get this one for roughly your budget: https://www.cyberport.de/?DEEP=1C31-37F ... HEEALw_wcB

Not sure if it is available in the US though.

[GaryG]

I was in a very similar situation; old i3 laptop was struggling with uhes ACE and Tyrell, Reaktor Blocks etc but I didn't want to spend a large amount on a dedicated laptop just for my music work. I thought doubling the benchmark would be a good target so found myself looking at 3rd gen i5s, mainly HP Elitebooks and Lenovo t430s etc (ie. refurbished business class machines). In the end I found a bargain dell latitude on ebay, immaculate with 1 yrs guarantee for £150 I think it was ($170?). Certainly i7s available for not too much more.

Easily handles most Block ensembles and synths I throw at it, just some mega VCV patches struggle. I luckily had some ram lying around that fitted it so doubled the RAM to 8GB, considering moving the 1tb hardrive to the dvd slot using an adapter and installing an SSD just for the OS drive (~120gb maybe).

So, if you like synths like Synth 1 then I think an i5 will be fine, should be able to handle hungrier plugins too within reason.