Broken Laptop - What to do?

Alexi

Drench Audio
VIP Junglist
Joined
May 21, 2007
Location
Bristol/Southampton
This is mainly for people who know a little bit about computers, as my knowledge is very limited

My laptop which I used to use for producing got it's hard drive killed while switched off in a power surge.

It was about 5 years old but did its job, but as I'm off to uni in september was thinking of upgrading anyway, not to anything amazing, not bothered about games and graphics, but just so I can use the internet, msn etc and produce in my free time

My options are:

Get a new hard drive for my current laptop for about 80 quid

Buy a new cheap laptop and upgrade the RAM so it can run a DAW to some extent, and use my external soundcard

Buy a Macbook and spend the next couple of years trying to pay for it

Build a custom laptop PC so I can produce tunes without having to worry about spec



One last thing, what are the main things you have to have for a decent music production computer? I guess RAM and Processor speed are important but not sure what else because I've got an audio interface with a good soundcard.


Cheers, Alexi
 
build a custom laptop pc.

if you have the technical ability to do this its a no brainer for me.

youll get basically the best equipment very cheaply and generally save yourself lots of money. plus you can just put everything you need into it... no wastage.
 
what Dan said mate, its your choice weather you prefer a laptop or a desktop but over all for bang for buck i would design a high spec PC running XP pro. either chuck a good soundcard in that or put an audio port in then attach your external soundcard.

get a sequencer ie cubase
get lots of VST's
get as many samples as you can possibly get your hands on
try some sound design programs like fruity loops or reason - make more original samples

if you decide to have 2 drives (common with ya desktops) you can keep all your samples on one drive or backed up on both. i recommend getting 2 x 250gb drives or higher, 2 gb of RAM or more, and a processor in the 2ghz region and you should be laughing.

of course you could get by on a little less but the more horsepower the better. if your in Education right now you can get things failry cheap @ an educational discount on a few websites such as Inta Audio.com, you can get a sick PC thats fully upgradable as well for just under £500
 
Cheers for the responses,

it's gotta be a laptop because i need it for uni, and i've got all my samples and patches etc backed up on an external hard drive so that's not an issue.

Due to being skint, i'll probably have to stick to free VSTs, but I'll speak to my mates who have built computers before to make sure I get everything at best prices etc.
 
Thing is... building your own laptop isn't as easy as building a desktop PC when it comes to choice. Obviously you would have to get a barebones kit and then all the parts...

I can't see you building your own laptop for cheaper than just getting a cheap Dell, or Toshiba or whatever.
 
Thing is... building your own laptop isn't as easy as building a desktop PC when it comes to choice. Obviously you would have to get a barebones kit and then all the parts...

I can't see you building your own laptop for cheaper than just getting a cheap Dell, or Toshiba or whatever.

yeah with a bit of research today I'm finding that, if it was a PC it would be a lot easier and cheaper but thats not an option

Think I may have to go for a prebuilt laptop and just customise before buying, as you can do on the dell etc website, probably go for more ram and a better battery
 
My advice: build a custom DESKTOP. They're much cheaper, easier to piece together and more reliable than a laptop...I have a quad-core with 4GB of RAM, blu-ray, dvd-rw, 1.5TB hard drive space, 22" samsung screen, laser mouse, 7.1 sound card, 1GB graphics memory, and it cost me under £900 all together 2 years ago.

And then get a cheap netbook for uni seeing as you won't need to do any producing on it! I snagged myself an Acer Aspire One (good performance, very pretty, runs windows 7 smoothly) for about £175.
 
I'd buy a new hard drive for the old laptop, keep that for doing general stuff, then take advantage of Apple Mac's discount for students and buy a discounted Mac!!

Or instead of the Mac buy a Windows based laptop that's capable of running DAW etc, and install XP & Hackintosh so you have the best of both worlds.

;)
 
I'd buy a new hard drive for the old laptop, keep that for doing general stuff, then take advantage of Apple Mac's discount for students and buy a discounted Mac!!

Cheers mate, do you know where I can get the student discounts, because I've checked out some websites and they only give you like 5% student discount, so the mac is still ridiculously dear.
 
Get an official Apple refurbed macbook...Cheaper than buying on fresh...yet you wouldnt know the difference...comes as new in box, with 5 year warrenty included.
Get some good discounts...just monitor the stock regularly and you will bag yourself a gem!!

http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/specialdeals/mac

I got an ipod nano years back for £30 when they retailed at £150!!

Cheers bruv, will have to keep checkin that link & try n grab me a bargin
 
you can customize your setup much better with a pc have it run how you want it too. and like everyone said it will be way cheaper if not better than a mac.
 
Back
Top Bottom