The Perfect Laptop for Recording!!

[DannySavage]

Basically I'm looking for a nice laptop to start recording my own tracks with. So really what I want is some advice and recommendations for a laptop that can handle some good quality music production.

What specs would you recommend for the computer?
What makes and companies have you found to be easy to work with regarding recording music?

I don't want to spend anything more then £1000. So anything below that is ok.
I don't mind if you recommend a widows or apple laptop as long as you tell me why its good and what moved you to buy it!

Haven't really decided what programs I'm going to run yet but, if I got a windows laptop the DAW I'd use would be Cubase and for apple it would be logic.

I'm a guitarist so keep that in mind when you give your recommendations.

Music that I would aim to be making would be more of a rock style.

Remember that if successful, alot of people could use this thread as a reference in the future so please don't hold back from commenting

Really look forward to your comments guys!!

P.S. If you really feel you need to, you can recommend a good desktop computer that you've had a good experience with.

[Sporky_McGuffin]

I am tediously fond of my Lenovo. It needed a RAM upgrade and I swapped out the hard-drive for a 7,200rpm jobby, but it has Firewire for your audio interface, a lovely 1680x1050 screen (very crisp and even) and the hard drive is shock-mounted to protect it from knocks and bumps. You can bung in a second hard-drive if you take out the DVD writer.

Also, generally, it's one of the best made laptops I've encountered. Really solid, great keyboard and both a trackpad and a pointer nubbin. Not very stylish looking - it's black and slabby - but utterly reliable thus far. I think with the extra RAM and new hard drive it came to about £750.

[jalapeno]

For Windows a Dell or Lenovo - easiest to get spares and service for. Only possible wrinkle is Vista - you have to buy a PC with Vista these days and Windows7 is upon us soon - do thorough research on driver support for sound cards and software.

[Sporky_McGuffin]

To get the build quality of the Lenovo R60 that I have you'd need to be looking at a Dell Precision - I have the latter for work and it's the first Dell laptop I've used which hasn't regularly enraged me.

[jalapeno]

For Windows a Dell or Lenovo - easiest to get spares and service for. Only possible wrinkle is Vista - you have to buy a PC with Vista these days and Windows7 is upon us soon - do thorough research on driver support for sound cards and software.

or buy a Macbook & Logic Express (but do checkout Ableton & Reason as alternatives).

[DannySavage]

Yeh Macbooks look relly good for music but its just the price. I suppose set up is quite easy all you need is logic and a apogee duet. But, I want to find out some other choices. Is there any companies out there that make computers/laptops purely for music production? Keep coming with your suggestion by the way.

[Sporky_McGuffin]

Scan do and seem to have had some good reviews, but I've not tried any of theirs.

[DannySavage]

I have heard of scan before. I looked at there website the other day and their 3XS systems look ok. They don't do laptops, only desktops. Anyone here had any experience with scan computers?

Keep coming with your suggestions!!

[Danny1969]

My advice as someone who does a lot of recording and a lot of fixing laptops is :

Avoid anything from the highstreet, anything with an AMD processor, anything with a games playing Nvidia video card.
Get something with simple onboard graphics, Intel CPU, at least 2 ram slots and one that can take 2 harddrives. Check the onboard firewire chip is fully compatible with the audio interface your gonna be using. If your gonna be tracking a lot of things at once (whole band) then an SSD is the best bet. I have a Latitude XT with SSD that can handle 32 tracks at once.

Dell Latitudes and Dell Precisions with a three year onsite warranty are good. Lenova do make some well built machines but parts \ accessories are not as easy and cheap to come by

So basically for laptop music production you want a machine that won't get too hot because it's got a high spec GPU, one that can spread the load over two harddrives (one for OS, one for audio) A decent firewire chip. Theres actually a lot more to it than that but it might help narrow things down.

[DannySavage]

So how would a macbook with

* 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MB on-chip shared L2 cache running 1:1 with processor speed
* 1066MHz frontside bus
* 4GB (two 2GB
SO-DIMMs) of 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; two SO-DIMM slots
Firewire 400 and 320 gb hard drive compare to all of what you recommended?
I know you said to avoid anything from the highstreet but a macbook has been recommended alot in other forums.

I'm not going to be recording a whole band. The only thing i'll record live would be vocals and guitar. The rest, like drums, will be done on a program. Get back to me as soon as you can Danny1969 because you sound like you know your stuff.

Any more suggestions?