Laptop for live use

[derek]

just to avoid any misunderstandings, its not that i recommend the dell as in "get the dell and nothing else". i obviously am one happy dell customer, but since those laptops are made of standard components like everything else, im sure you can find a lot of good alternatives. i only mentioned that dell because it fit your description.

having said that, i can say that going with the dells is definetly a good idea, but gateway is probably the same. the only thing id advise is that you stay with the big companies and avoid the noname/ultracheapo stuff. those tend to be a little cheaper, but they usually save the money in places you dont see first, quality, details that are in the fineprint, i.e. its popular to not specify what speed the HD is, and then you find out its a 4300 drive, or the motherboard is some weird noname thing that makes your system unstable or less performant...that kind of thing.

so, basically, id recommend a dell, or some equivalent from the big guys, HP, gateway, sony, ibm (ibm is said to be VERY good, very very high quality, but theyre also a bit more expensive), the better toshiba models (not the cheapo ones), and that you get a dothan CPU and watch for HD speed and that its not shared memory graphics (allthough as i said it probably will be hard to find a laptop that combines dothan CPU with shared memory BS :-). then you cant really go wrong. and about the displays, yes, the dell display is VERY good. but to be honest most laptops come with nice displays these days so i wouldnt worry too much about that, thats only a question of "very good" versus "awesome" if you know what i mean :-)

@120meg:

ill look into that link right now :-)

[Consumer Whore]

Acer do great laptops with good components at a fair (IMO) price. I have a Travelmate 801LCi - it's a (relatively meagre) 1.4Ghz Pentium-M, 512ram. It's a joy to use for small-scale music production. I've used it live with energyXT, FL Studio, Z3ta+ and other VSTs, sampling, etc and never came close to reaching it's CPU limit.

If I had the money I would have opted for the Acer Aspire 2003 WLMi. That looks like a beast. Google-around for reviews.

Here's a great forum that helped me: http://www.whatlaptop.co.uk/forum/

[derek]

Too bad :( It's basically a project loaded with stuff that comes with Sonar 3 PE. And by observing the CPU meter you can compare systems at different latencies.

If you have the time, please check this out :
http://www.notebookreview.com/forums/to ... IC_ID=2657

This could be fun and informative, just download this free program to calculate pi (windows based only).
ftp://pi.super-computing.org/windows/super_pi.zip
Then run the program to measure the time it takes to calculate pi to 2 million digits.

i just ran the test and its more or less what i expected. i got 1 min 50 seconds, set to powersaving/speedstep and without disabling any background tasks like mcafee security center, VNC server and stuff. i was too lazy to try it out with maximum performance and all background tasks disabled, id guess it would end up somewhere around 1, fortysomething, but this is closer to "real life" IMO.

either way, that more or less puts it just where expected, better than a 3 GHZ pentium 4, about the same as a 3,something P4 or a fast athlon. i guess an extreme edition P4 or the fastest athlon 64s or opterons would be a little faster even, but then, those really wouldnt make any sense in a laptop (unless youre after a laptop with 20 minutes battery life and fans that run nonstop ;-)

[rlabz]

derek, rlabz or anyone else...
How good is the onboard sound card of the Dell laptops? I mean, could you really use it live? How long can you stand listening to the onboard sound through headphones? Is the computer buzz soft enough??
I'm thinking of getting rid of my desktop and getting a laptop, and I only want to use it live with audio out...

I don't hear any noise on the output side of things, through headphones. I wouldn't worry too much about it, it sounds fine for what I've been using it for thus far (composing with headphones). However, recording, on the other hand, is noisy as !@#( ! I strongly DO NOT recommend the onboard sound for recording. But for playing/composing, there's no problem. I would certainly use mine for live stuff, though as yet I haven't. But sound quality is a non-issue for live work, as I said. I wouldnt want to do any hardcore mixing/mastering on it, but since I've only used headphones with it, that's not much of an issue either.

If you're going to ditch your desktop, though, you will want to invest in a good pro quality interface. The onboard stuff is "good enough" to use in the meantime, but for a primary machine, you'll want something better. I reiterate: for live stuff, the onboard card is good enough, particularly with low latency (ASIO4ALL).

Hope this helps

[blaster78]

I haven't read all of the thread so forgive me if i'm repeating stuff but i do own 4 laptops so I thought i'd add my thoughts.

i've never used any of them for live music but in the past i have used them for music in general

all 4 of them are ibm, 3 t series (21, 23 and 40) these are very solid (and often perform a lot better than their specs would lead you to believe) but they are very expensive. They have excellent batteries (about 2 1/2 hrs at full, intensive use but up to 3 1/2 if the screen is dimmed and used less intensively) so you could do an impromptu gig in a field with no power if you fancied. they also (in my opinion) have a really good keyboard for a laptop and they also have a nipple thingy for the mouse which i much prefer rather than a touch pad thing.

what i have found is that if pushed hard (as i imagine live music would do) after a few years everything starts to "die" on you. you get unexplained memory failures, the battery starts to loose capacity and your disk speed is sometimes questionable. this might be the same with all machines but again you come up against the ibm "price" issue with any replacements.

that said, when less than a couple of years old i have used them in some strange/dusty/humid/hot/wet places and they have performed great - I would say that i would give up before they do

anyhow, probably not particularly useful, but i would recommend them if you (or in my case work) have plenty of cash (i've used a variety of makes -dell, tosh, sony) and ibm are my favourite.

ps. i don't work for ibm

cheers,

steve.

[twister]

Here is another vote for IBM! Last week I received Dell Inspiron 9100 with a desktop P4 HT 3.2GHz (1GB DDR400, 60GB 7200 rpm hd, 128MB ATI 9700 video, 8xDVD+RW, 15.4" WSXGA+). I selected the top of the line laptop system, but it was extremely heavy, not comfortable to use (crappy keyboard and pointing device), VERY loud fan, and SuperPi calculations gave me results worse than Dothan M!!! So, I just send it back and placed an order for a brand new IBM Thinkpad T42 with 745 Dothan M1.7GHz, 1GB DDR333 ram, 7200 rpm hd, 64MB ATI 9600, 15" SXGA+, w/3 year warranty for around $2,500. Of course Dell was cheaper, but this is IBM quality. Even their hard drive has a special sensor that stops writing if you shake or drop the laptop. Also, I would not recommend any Wide Screen 15.4" displays. It looks great at high resolution when you watch DVD or play a game. When, for example, in FL Studio you can not see a crap in piano roll at that high resolution. If you lower resolution, everything looks fuzzy.

[derek]

note the dell 9100 is a desktop CPU laptop, so, even though the model number suggests otherwise, its not the "top" model. anyway, the inspiron is often mistaken as the "top model" series, yet there are two systems even above it. the inspiron just happens to be one funky consumer unit (and trust me when i tell you that the inspiron 8600 is absolutely quiet.

it is kinda heavy though. personally i prefer that, i use it often on stage and it makes me feel more comfortable to use a stable huge unit instead of some fancy lightweight ultra slimline laptop. but thats just a feeling in my stomach, so no real point ;-)

[jamesb]

Hope this helps

Sure does. Thanks rlabz and derek.

The desktop setup has great performance and is cheap, but is kind of a pain to lug around. And if a plugin does one of its random copy protection checks in the middle of a gig, I'll be stuffed unless I've got a screen handy!

From what you're saying, it sounds like the onboard sound will be fine (for a while at least) in my situation.

Thanks...

[Bigg John]

having said that, i can say that going with the dells is definetly a good idea, but gateway is probably the same.

There is a huge difference in support. I used to work for gateway (not directly, but i took their support calls). If you were on the phone for over 15 min with 1 call, they put your name up on this huge ass scoreboard -type thingy. if you were ona call for 30 mins, 3 or 4 managers would show up at your cubical basically saying why the hell r u on the phone so long.

I had a lady call one time. brand-spankin new computer. she had tried to update norton first thing. when she tried to reboot after the update, windows just refused to start. When i asked my manager about it, he refused to let me help her any further becuse she had downloaded the update from the internet. I was like, "the software is preinstalled by us and is basically useless without the update. what the hell you want her to do ?? Pay norton to ship a cd rom to her every time they write new updates ". He simply did not care.

Dell support was ran by the same company in the same building. It was a well known fact around there that dell was a much better quality in terms of support. There just wasn't the pressure to turn numbers like there was at gateway.

Gateway has put out some absolute crap hardware too. Red owl modems, the "Astro"- Oh My God, what a freakin nightmare to support.

GATEWAY FREAKIN' SUX. You'll rue the day dude, You'll rue the day.

[SARcazm]

@ Lord CI: My Compaq nx8000 arrived today (2.0 dothan, 1 gig ram, 60gig 7200 hd with a slot to add another and DVD RW drive). As I mentioned before, it is a little pricey BUT it does have everything that you were looking for.

Will run it through the Sonar test tomorrow, after I've installed all my junk

[derek]

lol@bigg john.

i guess that has happened at some point in time in every computer company (dell used to have just a so so reputation too).

to me personally, the important thing is the next-day-on-site-service. we were on tour, and our video technicians laptop was broken. next day, next city, in the afternoon the dell tech arrived to repair the laptop, but also with a new replacement just in case. and that while were on tour, every day somewhere else. that was impressive. its kinda pricey to have this kind of guarantee (including optional insurance in case it fell down these days!), but well worth it when youre on the road. resotre your data from some external firewire drive and youre ready to go again on the same day.

[Bigg John]

lol@bigg john.

i guess that has happened at some point in time in every computer company (dell used to have just a so so reputation too).

to me personally, the important thing is the next-day-on-site-service. we were on tour, and our video technicians laptop was broken. next day, next city, in the afternoon the dell tech arrived to repair the laptop, but also with a new replacement just in case. and that while were on tour, every day somewhere else. that was impressive. its kinda pricey to have this kind of guarantee (including optional insurance in case it fell down these days!), but well worth it when youre on the road. resotre your data from some external firewire drive and youre ready to go again on the same day.

Yeah, some companies take pride in their support. I used to work for ibm supporting their servers. We were like "Deluxe" Tech support. I used to have calls at least once a month that lasted in excess of 8 hours. If we didn't have them up and running with in 15 minutes (or at least well on the way), we immediately dispatched a technician. The servers we were supported though were between $7-15,000, so the customers demanded excellent support.

[KitoE]

I don't hear any noise on the output side of things, through headphones. I wouldn't worry too much about it, it sounds fine for what I've been using it for thus far (composing with headphones). However, recording, on the other hand, is noisy as !@#( ! I strongly DO NOT recommend the onboard sound for recording. But for playing/composing, there's no problem. I would certainly use mine for live stuff, though as yet I haven't. But sound quality is a non-issue for live work, as I said. I wouldnt want to do any hardcore mixing/mastering on it, but since I've only used headphones with it, that's not much of an issue either.

I have a DELL Inspiron 8600 Centrino 1.8 w/ 512 RAM & 7200 RPM HD. Integrated sound with ASIO4ALL is improved, but IMHO not usable live... It sounds ok through headphones, but through a PA, many other sounds are revealed... You can hear the hard drive spin, the mouse move, etc...

You'll need an external card... I have an RME Hammerfall and I am getting 5ms latency with a fully loaded rack in Chainer... 1.5 is possible with less stuff loaded (I'm hoping another gig of RAM will allow for lower latency all the time).

Hope this helps.

Frank

[derek]

@frank:

note that this is a power/grounding problem - just fyi, when you run on battery, the noises go away.

of course grounding problems van also be solved otherwise, but to explain that, both my technical knowledge of all the details and my english arent good enough. fwiw, if you have a good technician and can explain this to him he will go "ah ok thats a no brainer, you need...(insert correct english term here)"

of course the quality is still superior when you use a pro audio card. but its good to know the way to have the "plan B soundcard" hum- and noise-free as well :-)

[Lord Choc Ice]

How about an Acer Travelmate 8006LMi with 2GHz Centrino Dothan, 1024 RAM and 7200 RPM harddrive? Would it perform good together with a Digigram VXpocket v2 PCMCIA sound card?

I think I'll be going for brainspawn's VST/DX host "forte" as the "plugin organizer". I have read through the manual, and all the features look simply astonishing! I just hope it'll work fine on the new set-up. I wonder if brainspawn has any hardware recommendations, like Digidesign's recommendations for Seagate HDDs...