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Best laptop for recording ( $500 max )

B

bassAddict05

Jan 1, 2005
275
0
39
Seattle
#1
I'm planning to sell my desktop pretty soon and am looking to buy a laptop that can temporarily replace my desktop as far as recording goes. The price range would be $500 dollar max , I just don't really know which one to go for, any advice would be much appreciated.

Here are the choices
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#12
While I like Dell's desktops, any of their laptops I've used are laggy and freeze up easily, including the Inspiron series. I personally think HP offers more for your money. The HP Pavilion dv6-6c35dx can be had for $429, and it has the AMD Quad-Core A8-3520M processor, 6GB of RAM (and can support up to 16GB!), 640GB hard drive, and a 15.6" screen. It also has Beats Audio; not sure if that matters to you or not. With that set-up, especially considering the quad core processor, you would be able to do anything you need to do.

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That being said, most modern laptops in your price range will probably be able to handle recording fairly well; I would look at some reviews of the laptops everyone has mentioned, check them out in person, and assuming they have comparable specs, which they probably will, leave it to personal preference. Good luck!
 
#13
HPs have higher hardware failure rates than Dells on average. But I do have to agree that Dell's desktops are better than their laptops. Once again, I would always prefer to use a desktop for recording.

HP has the highest hardware failure rate of any brand I know of, and my personal experience with HPs hasn't been great. So I don't recommend them.
 
#14
mixture of posts #2, 10, 12...
did not give any information on your audio interface. that one is more important than computer itself.
example: i use older line6 ux2 and never get more than 10-15% CPU usage. meaning - audio interface does the most computing. computer provides only visual interface for plugins and sequencer.
if you plan on using the built-in audio interface for recording - that's another story that opens whole new can of worms regarding signal to noise ratio, latency etc...

my suggestion - as most of computers on the market provide more than sufficient CPU power - focus on storage and RAM. in that order. check if internal HDD is either SS or have speed of 7200rpm. use external storage, either firewire or USB 3.
bear in mind - a laptop with same/similar specs as a desktop will have about 1/2 worst performance.
 
#15
gricko said:
bear in mind - a laptop with same/similar specs as a desktop will have about 1/2 worst performance.
Click to expand...

no, a laptop with the same/similar specs as a desktop will have the same/similar performance. That CPU/RAM/Hard Drive doesn't care what kind of case it's in, it's like saying that a full tower desktop will run better than a smaller form factor with the same hardware.

other than that though I agree, storage and RAM will be the priorities. Also, any laptop will probably come preloaded with crap from the manufacturer. I don't know about all brands but with a Toshiba if you run the recovery partition/recovery disks that let you reload windows it may not have the crapware on it. You will get a huge performance boost immediately if you do this, so I highly recommend doing it.
 
#16
Didn't read any of the other responses, so if anyone recommended what about to NOT recommend, this isn't aimed at you. :)

I bought a toshiba about 2 years ago. Also using cubase 5. And windows 7. Had blue screen issues. Sent it back. Came back. Fine for 2 days. Blue screen issues again, kept shutting down. Sent it back again. Fine again... long story short, I sent it back 3 times and then the warranty expired. Computer cost me around $600 with memory upgrades and a dvd burner. Toshiba refused to do anything more with it.

A friend offered me $100 for the computer (knowing of it's issues) and I took it becasue I knew if I didn't I was going to never do anything with it anyhow and it would quickly become obsolete. I took his offer. He uninstalled cubase out and never had an issue with it.

Was it cubase 5? I dunno. Was it windows 7? I dunno again. Was it Toshiba? I don't know that either, but I was wicked pissed that they flat out refused to do anything more the day after the warranty expired. And the computer only had about 30 hrs use on it. If even that much.

Yeah. I sold a 75 P bass for $200 about 10 years ago because the neck was a little warped too.
 
#17
It's not so much a question of what to buy but how to set it up. I agree that a desktop is a better option, but if you have genuine reasons for using a laptop for your recording (as I do - portability being the main one), then go for it. You need to decide whether to go 32 or 64 bit for the OS (Win7, presumably), but there's not much reason to stick with 32 bit these days. Ideally the laptop will be dedicated to recording and only occasionally go online (with the firewall on!) for updates and so on. When it's offline, turn the firewall off and run as few services/background programs as possible, as well as a minimal version of the OS with bells and whistles disabled (ask if you need to know how to do this). You won't need AV software if you're careful and this factor helps a lot with speed.

Running a bare bones OS offline, any modern laptop should record just fine. Using your day-to-day computer for recording can be a real hassle, though. Personally, I'd rather buy two used PCs and have one for regular web stuff and the other for recording than have one up-to-date machine and try to do everything with it. Regular day-to-day computing and recording are very different jobs and it's definitely better to do this with two different machines. As an analogy, imagine trying to adapt your family saloon car for specialised duty as a fork lift truck - you get what I mean?

I'm still using a Dell Inspiron Intel Core Duo, 3-4GB of RAM with (bare bones) XP and everything works like lightning, even when doing several tracks simultaneously with various VSTis and other plug-ins. I did upgrade the HDD to a 7,200 RPM one just to be on the safe side, and my audio gets recorded to an external HDD (USB2). The interface is a Presonus Firebox. Most of that is 4-5 years old tech now (yep, still on 32 bit here, although I'm running Reaper which is 64 bit internal architecture anyway - it's not really a huge issue, tbh). This system works fine because I did my homework on how to get it all working as efficiently as possible, which sort of takes me back to my first comment.
 
#20
KingRazor said:
That's one thing. Almost every laptop I've ever seen comes with a 5400RPM hard drive.

Wonder when we'll start seeing laptops with solid state drives.
Click to expand...
Yeah, with a 5,400 rpm drive you can go longer between battery recharges. One example of why a machine for everyday use isn't ideal for recording. And it doesn't matter whether we're talking PC or Mac in that respect - if you use just one machine for everything you do, it obviously has to be some sort of compromise.
 

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