Which laptop for DAW?

[eliam]

I'll be helping a friend to put up a laptop-based daw and I'd need some advice as to what to get.

I'll probably be buying from www.tigerdirect.ca

I need fw bus, good performance, reasonable price.

Thanks

[siriusbliss]

Alienware.

Greg

[kensuguro]

hmm.. my boss's alienware had all sorts of issues, but maybe it was specific to his unit.

I have to say macs to work pretty well though. It's so hassle free, the convenience is very hard to resist. I'm not specifically an Apple fanboy, but I'm a fan of macbooks working very well. It does matter which plugins your friend needs to use though.

I work on xp desktop + a vista tablet just to use kontakt2 as my piano sound. I'm trying to get rid of the vista tablet and get a macbook. As I've written here before, vista doesn't like my tablet pc proprietary drivers, so vista has been rough for me so far. Sounds like vista's been okay for many people with more standard setups, although I have to say that there are still many UI related things about Vista that makes me question microsoft's software engineering aesthetics. Again not to say OSX UI rulez, but many things in Vista seem to me, broken by faulty design. Ubuntu UI is even much better.

Sounds to me anything with a decent core2duo 2.5ghz or above, full RAM, fw, and second screen output would work fine. Or is it not that simple?

[siriusbliss]

hmm.. my boss's alienware had all sorts of issues, but maybe it was specific to his unit...

I'm on my 2nd Alienware, and have never had problems related to the machines themselves. They are workhorses.
WinXP with the occasional bad driver from software folks is another issue

Mine still has the PCMCIA/cardbus slot for my RME Multiface, and it horsepower to do video editing and will be the host for Xite-1 if/when it gets released

Greg

[dawman]

Brotha' Man Greg,
Which model do you use as a laptop?
I really need to think ahead and would like the ability to use a Laptop for a mobile rig and also have my rack ready as well.
Since you can do video editing I assume that the power is O.K.
I would be using it to stream samples and VSTi stuff.
The same HDD's can be shared w/ each DAW as they will be in an eSATA enclosure.

[kensuguro]

siriusbliss, that's good to hear. Those things always seemed like they would be workhorses, but I was wondering since my boss was the only one I knew that owned one. Guess that's another one on the list of good to go machines.

[siriusbliss]

Brotha' Man Greg,
Which model do you use as a laptop?
I really need to think ahead and would like the ability to use a Laptop for a mobile rig and also have my rack ready as well.
Since you can do video editing I assume that the power is O.K.
I would be using it to stream samples and VSTi stuff.
The same HDD's can be shared w/ each DAW as they will be in an eSATA enclosure.

Yeah, I use shared HDD's with my main DAW as well.
I have an older Area-51m 7700, and it handles everything you can throw at it since it's a 'notebook' rather than a 'laptop', so it's basically a desktop - so, yes, it tends to get hot, and in the past the fans would get noisy, but mine seems to be OK in that regard. They can also be heavy.
If you're getting an Xite, than you'll have to make sure you get a PCI or PCI-x slot.

Greg

[siriusbliss]

siriusbliss, that's good to hear. Those things always seemed like they would be workhorses, but I was wondering since my boss was the only one I knew that owned one. Guess that's another one on the list of good to go machines.

Similar machines in the Alienware category include Sager and Sonica (and some others that I can't recall right now).

Greg

[siriusbliss]

That alienware looks nice. Is it the 15,4" with c2d ?
Are the alienware notebooks also available with XP ?

I have the 17".

I don't know if they are available with XP anymore, but you can ask.

Greg