Buying a new laptop

I am buying a music laptop soon, and the two that I am looking at right now are the 3XS Scan Performance Laptop and the ADK 9000 or 8600.

They're both a little on the expensive side, but they are specced towards doing high end audio stuff, and supposedly have a better & more reliable output than standard laptops.

anyone have any experience with either?

I just bought a new laptop that is designed for Windows 8, and after a few weeks of tweaking I finally got Windows XP running perfectly on it. The only driver I couldn't get was for the ethernet, but I don't use the computer for the Internet anyways...

I must say even Windows 7 seems like shit, because generally you need at least 25 processes running at boot for it to work. I have my Windows XP set to boot with only 12 processes running, basically I just wanted pure efficiency.

Mostly the only thing those new operating systems bring is bs security features, and well, if your music making program runs 64 bit then that as well... But for me I won't be running 64 bit for probably at least 15 years, considering most of my favourite VSTs are not even available anymore and will never be ported to 64 bit lol.

The number of processes running is task manager is definitely something one should be aware of, but I'm not sure if using that as the main reason for not upgrading to windows 7 is that sound of an idea (no pun intended).

Here is a quick article I found on why windows 7 is better for getting the most out of your hardware than xp (assuming your hardware is capable of windows 7)

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/09/obsessive-windows-7-under-the-hood-guide-for-music-can-you-finally-dump-xp/

and just for giggles here are benchmarks between win7 and OSX

http://www.dawbench.com/win7-v-osx-1.htm

Seems like the advantage will only be apparent if there are at least 16 cores, my computer only has 4. Things like automatic media encoding isn't important to me as I generally work with wav files or mp3s encoded with the best lamemp3 encoder. But yeah, if I feel like I could work with 64 bit I'll have to move to 7, but as it is ableton only just started a 64 bit beta and I doubt it'll be stable for atleast 4 years especially with 32 bit VSTs so I still have time to enjoy xp's greatness!

Well this is a major ball ache. The fucker has sent me the right laptop but it has different specs than the one i ordered. I bought it brand new off ebay and the seller has thirty thousand odd sales with 100% feedback so i'm sure it was probably a listing mistake.

I can send it back but i'd like to hear what people think.

This is what i ordered:

Intel Core i5-3210M

2.5 GHZ (turbo boost to 3.1 GHZ)

6GB RAM

This is what i've received

Intel Core i7-3612QM

2.1 GHZ (not sure what it boosts to)

8GB RAM

  On 1/9/2013 at 3:12 PM, Rambo said:

Well this is a major ball ache. The fucker has sent me the right laptop but it has different specs than the one i ordered. I bought it brand new off ebay and the seller has thirty thousand odd sales with 100% feedback so i'm sure it was probably a listing mistake.

 

 

I can send it back but i'd like to hear what people think.

 

This is what i ordered:

 

Intel Core i5-3210M

2.5 GHZ (turbo boost to 3.1 GHZ)

6GB RAM

 

 

This is what i've received

 

Intel Core i7-3612QM

2.1 GHZ (not sure what it boosts to)

8GB RAM

do not send it back, the i7-3612QM pisses all over that i5

i know i7 is better but its the clock speed....

I'm in dxddiag looking for this AMD Radeon with 2GB RAM and im seeing nothing.

This is what it says:

Name: Intel HD graphics 4000

Manufacturer: advanced micro devices

chip type: intel HD graphics family

DAC: internal

Approx total memory: 1780 MB

  On 1/9/2013 at 3:28 PM, Rambo said:

i know i7 is better but its the clock speed....

 

 

I'm in dxddiag looking for this AMD Radeon with 2GB RAM and im seeing nothing.

 

This is what it says:

 

Name: Intel HD graphics 4000

Manufacturer: advanced micro devices

chip type: intel HD graphics family

DAC: internal

Approx total memory: 1780 MB

seriously man, ignore clock speed.

in this day and age, it means very little. especially when the margin is 400MHz, as in the case here.

what matters is the architecture, and cores.

trying to use clock speed as a decision to buy one thing over another is like using megapixels as a specification that matters in your decision to buy a camera.

as for the graphics card, yeah that's something to return it for. are you planning on using it as a gaming rig too? if so, yeah send it back. if not, intel 4000 graphics is just dandy for making music / watching films

otherwise same specs? graph, display, ports, etc..

strangest thing..any comments from the seller? i mean, that's quite an "upgrade", power- and moneywise..

also, you might want to use something like Speccy to check if the graphics card is actually there, and you just don't have it enabled in the driver.

my sister has an Alienware that can switch between the Nvidia graphics card, and the Intel 4000 graphics on the fly to save power.

dxdiags will only tell you what graphics card is being used at the moment, and won't show others connected and not in use.

  On 1/9/2013 at 3:35 PM, oscillik said:

  On 1/9/2013 at 3:28 PM, Rambo said:

i know i7 is better but its the clock speed....

 

 

I'm in dxddiag looking for this AMD Radeon with 2GB RAM and im seeing nothing.

 

This is what it says:

 

Name: Intel HD graphics 4000

Manufacturer: advanced micro devices

chip type: intel HD graphics family

DAC: internal

Approx total memory: 1780 MB

seriously man, ignore clock speed.

 

in this day and age, it means very little. especially when the margin is 400MHz, as in the case here.

 

what matters is the architecture, and cores.

 

trying to use clock speed as a decision to buy one thing over another is like using megapixels as a specification that matters in your decision to buy a camera.

 

as for the graphics card, yeah that's something to return it for. are you planning on using it as a gaming rig too? if so, yeah send it back. if not, intel 4000 graphics is just dandy for making music / watching films

I might have gamed on it a bit but it would only ever be a distant third place in priority 1. music 2. internet 3. gaming.

I would definitely be interested to know what the value of what i have been sent is worth in comparison to what was in the advert. If it was quite a bit less i might have to ask for some money back.

edit. on your 2nd post: Thanks i'll check that out.

  On 1/9/2013 at 3:52 PM, Rambo said:

  On 1/9/2013 at 3:35 PM, oscillik said:

  On 1/9/2013 at 3:28 PM, Rambo said:

i know i7 is better but its the clock speed....

 

 

I'm in dxddiag looking for this AMD Radeon with 2GB RAM and im seeing nothing.

 

This is what it says:

 

Name: Intel HD graphics 4000

Manufacturer: advanced micro devices

chip type: intel HD graphics family

DAC: internal

Approx total memory: 1780 MB

seriously man, ignore clock speed.

 

in this day and age, it means very little. especially when the margin is 400MHz, as in the case here.

 

what matters is the architecture, and cores.

 

trying to use clock speed as a decision to buy one thing over another is like using megapixels as a specification that matters in your decision to buy a camera.

 

as for the graphics card, yeah that's something to return it for. are you planning on using it as a gaming rig too? if so, yeah send it back. if not, intel 4000 graphics is just dandy for making music / watching films

 

I might have gamed on it a bit but it would only ever be a distant third place in priority 1. music 2. internet 3. gaming.

 

I would definitely be interested to know what the value of what i have been sent is worth in comparison to what was in the advert. If it was quite a bit less i might have to ask for some money back.

use Speccy, as I mentioned before, to check what (if any) dedicated graphics are in the machine.

I doubt that the i7 you have would be less than the i5 that was advertised, but of course it wouldn't hurt to know.

good news, it's saying the radeon is there

  On 1/9/2013 at 4:00 PM, Rambo said:

good news, it's saying the radeon is there

then, I would say that you've probably gotten a fucking nice laptop for the price of an i5.

my opinion - keep it and don't say a word!

So I'm getting a new laptop soon. It's powerful enough for music production. Though I don't know which DAW should I install... Any recommendations?

Reaper

Why?

because it's lean, and costs considerably less than the big boys.

reaper loads in about 2 seconds on my laptop

thanks, dude! I'll try it.

Tracktion 5

http://www.tracktion.com/

  On 5/5/2014 at 5:59 PM, logakght said:

Why?

because it's also lean, and also costs considerably less than the big boys.

Apologies for the necro - I'm also looking at upgrading my laptop, as my existing one will be be nearly a decade old by the end of the year. I've found an HP 'laptop' (though looks like it'd crush your lap) with an i9-9880H processor, costing about 3 times the price I paid for my old Sony Vaio back in the early '10s, however looking at the CPU comparisons it looks like I'm only getting performance of around 2 to 3 times the speed:

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-9880H-vs-Intel-Core-i7-2670QM/m750169vs1982

https://technical.city/en/cpu/Core-i7-2670QM-vs-Core-i9-9880H

Am I missing something (like completely misreading the results!), surely CPU clock speeds have improved considerably more than that over the last decade? If I were to compare the average CPU of something in the 90s from the same year range (e.g. 1991 - 2000), say for example 386DX/33 to Pentium MMX 200 it looks like the speed was close to 100 times the speed ( 6.5 Mips vs 400 Mips https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/BogoMips/bogo-list.html )

  On 6/8/2020 at 12:44 PM, mcbpete said:

Am I missing something (like completely misreading the results!), surely CPU clock speeds have improved considerably more than that over the last decade? If I were to compare the average CPU of something in the 90s from the same year range (e.g. 1991 - 2000), say for example 386DX/33 to Pentium MMX 200 it looks like the speed was close to 100 times the speed ( 6.5 Mips vs 400 Mips https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/BogoMips/bogo-list.html )

Nope. Clock speeds are running into physical barriers. CPU performance is improving because they get better at doing more things simultaneously, but not because they're doing them faster.

If you are talking about CPU clock speeds in GHz, then I believe this has actually stopped increasing in actual numbers due to physics - the size of logic gates on the cores has gotten so small that it's really difficult to manufacture and design so that they don't overheat and all that. Basically it seems CPUs just went more parallel, and now there are dual and quad core chips. Each core still runs at some 2.7GHz which is not so different from old times.

Basically I'd just get a laptop that is fairly OK and does not have any driver or software problems and is well built. If you are looking to min-max your performance you are better off getting some custom made gaming PC.