What Drives Your DAW - Laptop Or Desktop?

[gentleclockdivider]

He just can't resist the urge

[THE INTRANCER]

Looking seriously at buying a new laptop over the Black Friday period.

[pekbro]

Looking seriously at buying a new laptop over the Black Friday period.

Which are you considering? out of curiosity...

[THE INTRANCER]

Looking seriously at buying a new laptop over the Black Friday period.

Which are you considering? out of curiosity...

Don't know, still juggling between a few different laptops with configurable specifications to choose from and without blowing my budget. Plus I've to buy a new mobile phone so I can monitor my new solar panels and soon to installed air source heatpump among other things you can do with Samsung Galaxy phones.

[BONES]

Have a look on eBay, you'll get something there, either new or refurbished (old stock) for a lot less, often with a full warranty.

[mjolnir]

I am using a very bottom of the barrel laptop that I paid $300 for new.. It does seem to have problems with samples some times and I ran out of disk drive space on c: so I had to buy another drive and alot of vst's do not play nice when you try to start loading them on D drive. I am not particularly attached to the pc but if I am not making alot of money on music I don't really want to upgrade the pc. My life is fairly mobile so I need portable stuff.

i have almost an identical situation.
i was homeless and wanted to still work on music and needed the lowest cost computer available.
i didn't know that the storage capacity was so small, and so now I'm getting close to filling it up too full.
i haven't decided whether or not i ought to get another external drive or not since USB3 might still be too slow
for certain types of operating system or DAW procedurues. i'm also tempted to buy some pro audio gear.

but then again, i would probably get better sound quality from buying some of the demo VSTs that I've used lately.

anyways, i'm on a laptop computer running a wide variety of programs, including an old copy of 32-bit EnergyXT.

[dexrow]

I am using a very bottom of the barrel laptop that I paid $300 for new.. It does seem to have problems with samples some times and I ran out of disk drive space on c: so I had to buy another drive and alot of vst's do not play nice when you try to start loading them on D drive. I am not particularly attached to the pc but if I am not making alot of money on music I don't really want to upgrade the pc. My life is fairly mobile so I need portable stuff.

i have almost an identical situation.
i was homeless and wanted to still work on music and needed the lowest cost computer available.
i didn't know that the storage capacity was so small, and so now I'm getting close to filling it up too full.
i haven't decided whether or not i ought to get another external drive or not since USB3 might still be too slow
for certain types of operating system or DAW procedurues. i'm also tempted to buy some pro audio gear.

but then again, i would probably get better sound quality from buying some of the demo VSTs that I've used lately.

anyways, i'm on a laptop computer running a wide variety of programs, including an old copy of 32-bit EnergyXT.

I am space constrained so it would be interesting to hear about any external stuff that you hook up.. esp if the band leader can say move it solder, and I have it moved quickly

[BONES]

The thing is, you don't really need to spend a lot of money. You can buy a brand new laptop with a 12th Gen Core i5 and 16GB of RAM for well under US$500. Used ones are a couple of hundred cheaper again. I produced our last album on such a machine - Core i5, 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD - and it spent three months in various charts in Germany.

[Chris Hawkins]

I am currently working from a MacBook Air (M2).

[jonljacobi]

Really makes no difference, as long as there's a large monitor available.

[Awats]

I switched from an HP i7 laptop to an i7 desktop 12700K to get away from the screaming fans. Worked well otherwise.

[legendCNCD]

Really makes no difference, as long as there's a large monitor available.

even the OS does not make so much difference - that is until you run into mac finder

[THE INTRANCER]

Spent a week waiting for new credit card so have been unable to buy anything (have a debit card but feel more secure with credit). The laptop I was gonna buy was out of stock, a 15.6 model, but now back in stock. Decided to go for a 17.3 inch screen laptop because I've already got a 15 inch Toshiba dualcore laptop for web browsing. Now unsure in whether I really need a new laptop at all and whether I should just build myself a more powerful desktop for the price of a laptop I could buy. I was considering a 17" MSI laptop, but read stuff online about the hinges being poor. It seems that with whatever laptop you're gonna be compromises be that with the screen RGB coverage, GPU, ports etc. etc. The main reason for having a laptop is to lower the electricity bill we have, although saying that I do have an 8 Panel Solar Array on my roof to help with that. Night time use of the I7 920 desktop, 23" monitor I have along with the fridge, 32" TV downstairs is around 380 watts per hour. During a bright sunshine clear blue sky day I generate around 2 - 2.3 Kilo Watts whilst the battery trickle feeds whatever it has back in to the house when it gets dark or during the normal cycle.

My current desktop does everything and more that I need it to with plenty of expandability and enough power for everything graphics wise, multiple monitors.(AMD RX570 8 Gig Card). Perhaps I can use that card in a new build to save some cash along with the PSU. Don't know what the going rate of DDR3 Memory is now, but 20 gigs of it won't be much good in a new motherboard. Unless I'm playing a FPS game, my current PC system is relatively quiet, which I guess is a bigger deal when it comes to music production system and perhaps more so if doing graphic design without headphones on or some other device. I guess the other benefit of desktop is that anything dies, you can replace it, where as if it's anything but the hard disk / SSD or memory DIMMs, or an expensive new battery to replace you're pretty much screwed, without having to send it back to the retailer if under warrantee. I've had my Toshiba Satellite laptop since 2008, it runs off the main as the battery did die, but otherwise never had any problem. It's built like a tank though, I'm not too sure if todays laptops can be said to be the same in quality of build.

Man, Black Friday week, it's so tempting to impulse buy without doing some proper research first and more importantly, properly evaluating whether what you want is whether what you actually need.

[martinjuenke]

Finally I've managed to migrate all my music stuff to a fancy new gadget.
It warms up my tracks in seconds.
The ultimate quick production solution.

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[cryophonik]

Just don't try using it for heavy metal