It's time to buy a new pc for my home studio.
I'd like to buy a powerful laptop instead of a desktop, I travel a lot and I would like to take my music everywhere since I can't alway take my arranger with me. Any suggestion of what to buy? Thanks a lot for your help.

Cheers,
Maximo

My laptop is only meager at best, compared to what's hot today. It's a PIII 600Mhz. Runs all my music stuff without a hitch. I'm sure the new ones run over a gig, but I'd strongly recommend WIN98SE over XP - too many people are still whining, and my pc runs like a charm.

please don't use 98se.

i agree with not using XP, but i recommend win2000. otherwise, use LINUX.

as for a laptop, i have a DELL Inspiron 8100, which is a pIII 1.13Ghz with 512MB ram. it is a ver nice laptop, i am a power user so i need all that processing power!

a very good laptop will run you a few grand however. so it all depends on what you want to spend. but no laptop compares to the performance of a desktop, which are much cheaper and perform much better.

it's all on your taste i guess.

good luck!

Hello everybody,

May I give my dissendant opinion. I would strongly not recommend XP for an old machine because the primarliy problem with XP is hardware support. There are no drivers for the most beloved equipment. You upgrade and then you need to buy a new scanner, new printer, new sound card, new CDR and so on and so forth. Many softwares and utilities do not work on XP.

However, if you are planning to buy a new machine, XP and especially XP-PRO is the way to go. XP is more reliable than 98SE. It has better support to newer and faster hardware. The boot time of XP beats Win2k big time and new software sequencers are moving to XP. For example, Steinberg Cubase SX is primarily tested on XP and will not install on 98SE. Furthermore, MOTU 896 drivers have been reported to be far more reliable on XP than 98SE. I have been finding consistently that those who upgrade to XP over 98SE for music DAW station are always happier and they numerate many problems that disappeared by simply upgrading.

What processor? Right now the best processor is high end P4 (northwood core), followed by select AMD, followed by P3. I would strongly avoid celeron, low end P4. I do not know if you can get high end P4, or any kind of P4, on a labtop. However, in this case, I would strongly try to find P3 1.2 GHZ which faster and cooler than P3 1GHZ, if is this is possible.

I built a 1.2 and it is great. overclocked, it beats P4 2.0 in benchmarks (except for Rambus ram...). I have a dual boot 98se and XP pro. 98se is still the OS of choice but if you are buying all new equipment I would go with XP. XP is suppose to run older software (if you click on a program's icon and go to Properties you will see a Compatiblity tab for older OS)...it doesn't always work though. Supposedly, you can use many older drivers if you don't let XP load drivers during setup...I haven't tried it yet...I'm using 98se because of my 8port se midi interface.

WS,

I am wondering if you can build dual P3 1.2; now that, I think, will be a powerful setup.

Thank you guys for all the replys!
I'm going for a Pentium4 1.8, 512 SDRAM, 40GB hard drive, it comes with a "sound blaster compatible sound with wavetable" Windows XP and 16xCD-RW/DVD combination drive. Is that ok?
It's a Dell Inspiron 8200. Does anyone can think to something better or any other suggestion about it? I'm going to customize it, so I can chose different options if some of you guys let me know more about it I will appreciate it.
Thank you so much,
Maximo.

XP is built on a windows 2000 core, they added more aesthetic looks and goodies and opened up more security holes. therefore i do not recommend it.

win2k is just as reliable as XP but in my opinion it is safer to use.

if you want XP for the new look... you can easily do that in win2k with a program called windowblinds.

Maximo, That sounds great. You'll get alot of use from a system like that. Good luck !

Sounds like the business, Maximo. I'd go with win2k for music purposes. I quess the driver market will catch up with XP some day.

If you're only using it for music, I'd go with a Mac G4.

-tek