Computer Advice, the Umpteenth

[Moff Chumley]

Well guys, I'm planning on picking up a new laptop. Windows, by nescessity; I don't have the cash for a Mac. I'm looking for something in the $700-$800 price range, and I want to run DJ programs and whatnot on it, so stability is rather important. 6 or 8 gigs of RAM would be ideal, and the faster the proscessor, the better. There are several companies that sell dedicated music laptops, but they're out of my price range. Anyone have any recommendations?

[IonDragon]

Dell. I rather dislike Dell, but I saw a long line of defective HP DV600's (I got at leas 8 with the same problem). Sony and Toshiba are probably out of your price range and Thinkpads (my personal favorite family) aren't really what you're looking for.

Why exactly do you need so much RAM? A RAW audio file of average length is under 1GB...

[factotum]

I assume you're using some sort of 64-bit music app? If you're not, 6 or more gigs of RAM is a total waste, because the app itself can't use more than 4Gb even if you're running a 64-bit operating system. If you're running a 32-bit OS then the entire thing can't use more than 4Gb!

I'd also be surprised if you found a laptop in that price range that can have that sort of amount of RAM in it--RAM gets expensive in larger sizes, and laptops have to use large size RAM because they don't have many slots!

I would agree with the Dell suggestion above, anyway--you can spec up a laptop on their website and see what sort of price it comes to.

[Moff Chumley]

Yup, I'm going with 64 bit. Most music software has upgraded by now. And it's not about playing back an audio file, it's about playing back several audio files with massive amounts of proscessing, time-stretching, pitch shifting, and other such DSP shenanigans at the same time. :smallcool:

Anyhow, is it possible to buy something with 4 and then upgrade it?

[Erloas]

Chances are you aren't going to find any laptops with more then 4GB of RAM stock in your price range. Getting 8GB of RAM (from Newegg) will run you about $100-150, which would be 2x4GB because most laptops will only have 2 slots, so you would have to replace what is already in there. The few I've checked support up to 8GB, and I assume that will be the case with almost all laptops at this point.

You can find quite a few laptops in that budget with Phenom II quad cores, but I'm not seeing anything with a Core i7 until you get to $900.

This is one of the cheaper i7 machines I found, and with 6GB of RAM, though at $900 instead. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834157387)

Unfortunately the majority of the Phenom II quad cores are paired with really bad graphics cards, which might not be much of an issue with you since you never mentioned gaming, but even as a background idea I would keep it in mind. Also I know a lot more rendering software is going to GPU rendering and if the software you are using does then having a good video card would be important there too.

Here is a decent example of a Phenom II quad core, though only 4GB of RAM. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220755)

A quick search of Dell shows that even with a 30% discount on their best selling models they still seem to be behind in the price/performance. And they don't seem to have anything with a quad core at less then $1000. Which just helps reinforce why I never even bother to check Dell when looking to give people advice.

[Moff Chumley]

I remember reading that graphics cards were important for audio, although that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. *shrug*

EDIT: And it looks like I'll just save up for something around $1,000.

[Jimorian]

I remember reading that graphics cards were important for audio, although that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. *shrug*

I think this is because motherboard graphics or basic cards will use a lot of system RAM, while a good card will mostly use its own memory cache.

[Moff Chumley]

That would explain it, then.