Topic: What new laptop to buy?

[balou2]

You're walking down the street and a computer store owner invites you in, gives you $1000 and says, "buy one" (buy you can't go over $1k).  What would you buy?

I'm in the market.  Will be using for all home and office utilities, but recording as well.  Have a Dell Latitude 600 now.  Would like to be able to run multi-track recordings and do post stuff as well so it needs some decent RAM.  No graphics, no gaming, just audio and business.  Definitely need a DVD burner as I begin converting everything to FLAC and archiving.  HD should be at least 40.

Once done, what are some preferred multi-track devices for the unit (i.e. digital-multitracker or soundcard).  Would be initially looking to do up to 8 channels, but would ultimately like to move up to a least 32.

Thanks folks, and links are welcome.
mike

[balou2]

Nobody's gonna take this one hey?  C'mon...somebody' gotta have some good info.  If not, anyone know of a link with comparisons?

[kskreider]

Nobody's gonna take this one hey?  C'mon...somebody' gotta have some good info.  If not, anyone know of a link with comparisons?

OK, I will bite.  We are looking for a new laptop as well and want to stay around the $1000 range.  I am looking for more feedback on the IBM>Lenovo change, or lack thereof.  My sister bought a new Lenovo, but she still thinks AOL is the internet so I cannot trust her opinions on laptop hardware. 

First off what style of laptop are you looking for?  I would say that there are three: desktop replacement, mid-weight, and ultra compact.  You can get most if not all of the features that you are looking for in all three.  Just keep in mind that the smaller and lighter it gets, the more it will cost and harder to keep around a grand. 

Here are my personal experiences.  Don't hold me to anything I say...please.   

I regularly use two different ones. 

A Sony Vaio PCG-K13 which is an inexpensive desktop replacement.  I think that we eneded up paying about $1350 for this 2-3 years ago.  It weighs about 9+ pounds and now its crappy battery only last for about 90-120 minutes.  The display is beautiful.  (Come on it is Sony)  The CPU is a p4 2.8ghz which is a power hog and runs hot.  Not the best combo for a laptop.  The bad thing about the Sony is they pre-load it with every friggin' unecessary multimedia program that you would never use.     It has not had really any mechanical problems other than a user error or two.

Summary, heavy, hot and slow, but has a nice disply and an egronomic touchpad.

The 2nd one I use is a Dell 700m which is the ultra light class.  4.1 pounds with it's standard battery, but I added a 8-cell battery which pushes the power into the 5 hour range.  The trade off is another pound+ in battery weight.  This is most certainly NOT a desktop replacement since it has about 10 mini keys on its keyboard.  A lot of these are the punctution keys in the lower right of a standard keyboard and makes word processing difficult.  These gernerally are much more power efficient and because of this use smaller Pentium M processors up to 2.0ghz.  I think that mine is 1.6 or 1.7 and I added the internal intel wireless for centrino.  Its main use is for presentations, but doubles at night from time to time as a high-resolution recorder.  A tricked out 700m (which is being phased out with the 710m) can easily knock you up into the $1500 range, but Dell does end of hte quarter deals often and I nailed a loaded one down for about $750 + about $100 in upgrades to the door.  This one has had mechanical problems.  One month after receiving it the motherboard would not POST without rebooting 40 or 50 times.  I sent it in and got a brand new mobo replaced and back in action within 3 days.  The turn around from CA>TN>CA absolutely floored me.  It was just difficult to get "Mike" from India to understand what I needed.  Then one week after its warranty ran out it randomly locked up.  I went to the Dell site downloaded every driver and BIOS for it that had ever been released and proceeded to do a complete C: re-format to remove whatever magical conflicts the garbage programs were having.  Only Wavelab, MS Office, and Symantec Corp on it now

Summary: small, light, cheap, some hardware problems that were easily fixed.

Odd thing is that I was told to STAY AWAY from the new Sony's.  Not sure why.  I would be interested in other's feedback on what they use too. 

[balou2]

Thanks Keith.  Leave it to TEAM San Francisco Bay Area Tapers AND TEAM Neumann to step up.

I'm curious as well about the whole IBM switch.  My only thought about this is the support factor.  I'm tentative about purchases that take place prior, near or soon after any type of M&A, name change etc....  It just seems there is something lost in translation that detracts from hitting the ground running.

I'm specifically looking for a middle of the road notebook.  I don't need a full-on desktop replacement as we have a nice Sony at the house.  I also don' need a super-compact pocket puter.  Specific needs will include document and database management, and the ability to record.  I would like it to be wireless-equipped, but that shouldn't be an issue since just about all the new notebooks include Centrino technology.  HD need not be huge, but I'd like at least 40gb.  I would like to have at least 1g memory as I don't want to wait ad nauseum for large files to process etc...  I've thought about the Dell, but I have a Latitude D600 now (brand new last year) and it is already showing signs of wear and tear. 

[kindms]

I have a Sony Vaio PCG-GRS 700k (15") 1.8 GHz p4 (not mobile) 1GB Ram, ATI 7200mobility, CD-RW.DVD-Rom 60GB HDD, Ilink, ethernet, modem, windows 2k, original box, software etc, 2x internal batteries, neoprene sleeve, and VX Pocket 440.

I would be more than happy to sell it to you for your price point or below. Just throwing it out there. I used it pretty much for audio only. No dead pixels. I would even include the Pelican briefcase I have for it. I have all the original packaging and disc etc

PM me if your interested.

[TNJazz]

You're walking down the street and a computer store owner invites you in, gives you $1000 and says, "buy one" (buy you can't go over $1k).  What would you buy?

Anything with the Fujitsu brand name.  Have owned a total of 7 and currently own 3.  Rock solid and dependable.

E7110 is my main machine for multitracking.  P4 2.2ghz with 1gb RAM.  No problem for me to do 20-24 simultaneous tracks at 24bit/48kHz.

[mmmatt]

I recomend NOT buying an HP for audio.  HP lappy's have a wierd bug where they will check battery power every few minutes and put a beep in the recording.  With HP to have to physically remove the battery.  I can't tell you how many times, after running a multitrac, somebody shut down power on me or pulled my plug before I booted down... that sucks.  Size is pretty important in the field.  The first lappy I had was a tiny little averatec and it is a no-name computer but it worked well.  I was mislead by the software manufacture to believe that some problems I was having was due to lack of ram and this particular model was not upgradeable.  It just had .5 GB on the board and no slot. So I dumped it for the HP.  I found out later the problem I was having was due to the software not being able to record file sizes larger than 2GB and I was doing stereo 24/96 files.  24/96 stereo is about 1hr 2 min before it hits 2 GB, so all my files were corrupt at the end of the night.  If I had my way, I would take the averitec back, although I don't know how dependable they are over long periods of use since I only had mine a couple of months.
    Ram is not a big deal for multitracking.  .5 GB is plenty for most uses.  Ram does help when you run a lot of filters in post, but with live stuff you probably won't find yourself running a lot of filters.  I would make ram a low priority, but to have the ability to upgrade would be nice.
     Processor speed is important.  Mine is an amd 2800 and runs about 1.8 Ghz (I think).  It is more than enough for the 14 tracks @ 24/96 that I do with my rig.  I'm sure I could probably do twice that if I wanted to.  1.8 by todays standards is not that fast but in your budget you may only get that fast. 
     Hard drive size is probably no big deal because chances are you won't have a fast enough hd in the lappy anyways.  Plan on picking up a nice 7200/8mb cache external.  I have a maxtor usb2 200GB and believe me... 200GB isn't much when you are multitracking at 24/96.  In my case, doing a 14 track recording at 24/96 a 3 hr show is 42 GB!  Then as you are doing post, you will be using up more space.  I usually flac everything right away and then do post off the wav's.  So for a full multitrack it is not inconceivable for me to need 60 or 70 GB of space for just 1 show!
     If you are going to be using your computer for anything other than multitracking, you should probably do a dual boot setup.  In order to gaurantee flawless audio capture you should really dismantle every unneeded feature in xp.  Some computers behave better than others, but don't take any chances IMO.
     I have been told that some people have problems with external firewire pcmcia cards, but I have not had any troubles.  If I had my way though, I would have 3 or 4 usb ports and a firewire port.  lappy firewire ports (internal or pc card) don't send power thorough, so when picking your capture device don't plan on powering it off the firewire port.
     As for a multitracking device, I highly recomend the Mackie Onyx series mixers.  I have the ONYX 1220 and I am very happy with it.  It is a little on the large side, but that isn't usually a big problem in the field.  The biggest advantage of these mixers is that you can do a live mix while multitracking.  You get 4 (very nice) pre's, and 4 more stereo line in's.  I often time will do the live mix at 16/96 stereo while multitracking at 24/96 mono.  Then after the show I can burn a quick copy for the band.  They always like that!  The meters are good, there is an aux bus so that if you are doing a recording that the band doesn't necessarily want in the trading pool (for instance if they don't allow soundboards out but audience is OK) you can just take your ambient source and patch people out of that only.  Lot's of andvantages and the end result is great recordings!  Around Christmas time this past year, they were selling onyx 1220's for ~$500 WITH the firewire interface.  I paid about $750 a year ago and that was a good deal then.

Matt