Sub £500 laptop for basic recording.

Arktik83

As the title says really, looking to save a few pennies between now and xmas and looking for a sub-£500 laptop for making some banging choonz on!  

Basically I just want something I can hook up my THR10 to and just do some very basic recording on and just deep edit on the fly and get in to the basics of recording really!

I would like a mac but getting one under £500 is nearly impossible unless it's a fossil so I'm guessing windows based offerings would be more common.

Not looking for any mad graphix or anything like that, I have a pretty solid desktop PC, just want something I can arse about on away from my desk.

Cheers!

kizzer

I work at home on an Imac running Pro Tools. I needed something to take out for recording on location for cheap. Settled on an old Lenovo T61. Under £100 to buy, blanked it and reinstalled windows and my audio progs and drivers, installed a 2nd Solid State drive for about £40 so that could run my audio.

Going on 3 years and its still going strong, never had any problems. I wouldn't use it for mixing as the processor and ram spec isn't great, but purely for tracking its a winner.

Danny1969

Literally anything is good enough for tracking, we use Dell Latitude XT's which are ancient and only have 1.2Ghz processors and 1Gb of ram. We use them with 32 channels of ASIO via Tascam DM4800s

£500 will get you a banging audio laptop 

digitalscream

As Danny said, you don't need much. For example, the 12" HP Elitebook I just bought my daughter (second hand) has an i5 processor and 4GB RAM, which is roughly twice as powerful as the machine I recorded our album on.

That particular laptop was £108 delivered from eBay.

ThePrettyDamned

digitalscream;832535" said:

As Danny said, you don't need much. For example, the 12" HP Elitebook I just bought my daughter (second hand) has an i5 processor and 4GB RAM, which is roughly twice as powerful as the machine I recorded our album on.

That particular laptop was £108 delivered from eBay.

Did it come with an operating system? That's amazing.

I've just gotten my old laptop a new battery and PSU, deleted a lot of old stuff, ran ccleaner, disk defragment and I've got an as good as new i5 powered laptop with 4gb ram and a graphics card. Previously I was thinking of buying a new one!

Sadly, it's still running Windows 7 which seems to be a bit slow, despite turning aero off. But turn off the antivirus and it's capable of recording for sure.

digitalscream

ThePrettyDamned said:

digitalscream;832535" said:

As Danny said, you don't need much. For example, the 12" HP Elitebook I just bought my daughter (second hand) has an i5 processor and 4GB RAM, which is roughly twice as powerful as the machine I recorded our album on.

That particular laptop was £108 delivered from eBay.

Did it come with an operating system? That's amazing.

I've just gotten my old laptop a new battery and PSU, deleted a lot of old stuff, ran ccleaner, disk defragment and I've got an as good as new i5 powered laptop with 4gb ram and a graphics card. Previously I was thinking of buying a new one!

Sadly, it's still running Windows 7 which seems to be a bit slow, despite turning aero off. But turn off the antivirus and it's capable of recording for sure.

Yep - Win7 x64.

Slowness in laptops is - generally speaking - nothing to do with the CPU, graphics chip etc, but rather the hard drive. Most laptop manufacturers tend to include the slowest, cheapest 2.5" drives they can find. Spend £70 on a 256GB SSD and reinstall Windows, and you'll be astonished at the speed of the thing.

robwright

digitalscream said:

ThePrettyDamned said:

digitalscream;832535" said:

As Danny said, you don't need much. For example, the 12" HP Elitebook I just bought my daughter (second hand) has an i5 processor and 4GB RAM, which is roughly twice as powerful as the machine I recorded our album on.

That particular laptop was £108 delivered from eBay.

Did it come with an operating system? That's amazing.

I've just gotten my old laptop a new battery and PSU, deleted a lot of old stuff, ran ccleaner, disk defragment and I've got an as good as new i5 powered laptop with 4gb ram and a graphics card. Previously I was thinking of buying a new one!

Sadly, it's still running Windows 7 which seems to be a bit slow, despite turning aero off. But turn off the antivirus and it's capable of recording for sure.

Yep - Win7 x64.

Slowness in laptops is - generally speaking - nothing to do with the CPU, graphics chip etc, but rather the hard drive. Most laptop manufacturers tend to include the slowest, cheapest 2.5" drives they can find. Spend £70 on a 256GB SSD and reinstall Windows, and you'll be astonished at the speed of the thing.

Good advice - I'm going to do that d'rekly!

I've also got an HP Elitebook - paid £200 S/H about a year ago and it is amazingly fast on its shitty 2.5'' drive. Should fly with SSD!

Is the SSD easy to install?

robwright

Is this the kind of thing?

robwright

ThePrettyDamned said:

digitalscream;832535" said:

As Danny said, you don't need much. For example, the 12" HP Elitebook I just bought my daughter (second hand) has an i5 processor and 4GB RAM, which is roughly twice as powerful as the machine I recorded our album on.

That particular laptop was £108 delivered from eBay.

Did it come with an operating system? That's amazing.

I've just gotten my old laptop a new battery and PSU, deleted a lot of old stuff, ran ccleaner, disk defragment and I've got an as good as new i5 powered laptop with 4gb ram and a graphics card. Previously I was thinking of buying a new one!

Sadly, it's still running Windows 7 which seems to be a bit slow, despite turning aero off. But turn off the antivirus and it's capable of recording for sure.

What is 'aero' and how do you turn it off?

digitalscream

robwright said:

Is this the kind of thing?

I can't see anything, so I'm gonna go ahead and suggest one...

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/250gb-samsung-850-evo-25-ssd-sata-iii-6gb-s-mgx-3d-v-nand-512mb-cache-read-540mb-s-write-520mb-s-97k

Or, if you can justify the expense:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/500gb-samsung-850-evo-25-ssd-sata-iii-6gb-s-mgx-3d-v-nand-512mb-cache-read-540mb-s-write-520mb-s-98k

With SSDs, generally they get faster with higher capacity.

SSDs are pretty easy to install - same as any other hard drive, really, so it depends on the specific laptop. You can easily find teardown videos on YouTube for most laptops. Once you've physically installed it, it's just a case of reinstalling Windows (which is basically the same on any machine).

Another benefit is the lower power requirement compared with spinning rust drives, so you end up with more battery life and less heat generated too (which means your CPU will throttle less due to the overall heat in the machine, thus giving you a higher performance capacity).

IanSavage

Sounds like I might need to treat my MBP to one of those...hmm...

strumjoughlamps

digitalscream said:

As Danny said, you don't need much. For example, the 12" HP Elitebook I just bought my daughter (second hand) has an i5 processor and 4GB RAM, which is roughly twice as powerful as the machine I recorded our album on.

That particular laptop was £108 delivered from eBay.

Yeah I got similar with a Lenovo Thinkpad, 12.1 screen, i5, 4gb ram, 250gb hdd, gen W7, £90

robwright

robwright said:

Is this the kind of thing?

Doh! Cut and paste address and forgot to hit return?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Samsung-840Evo-250GB-SSD-solid-state-drive-NEW-Boxed-SATA-/291586228400?hash=item43e3e4c0b0:g:0j0AAOSwI-BWGRJS

It looks like the same one you suggested. Great rice compared to a year ago!

Danny1969

I'm not sure why people always assume a machine needs to be powerful to record music. It's not a taxing thing for a computer to do, playing modern games is, rendering video is, but not recording audio. 

Here's the thing, when I got into recording I had a Pentium 133Mhz with 32Mb of ram. So a single ended CPU that ran at 133Mhz and had less ram than a modern doorbell. Yet on that I ran Cubase VST, recording audio tracks with plugins and was very happy. Go forward 8 years and I had a P4 machine with a whopping 256Mb of ram, now I was running Samplitude and was recording track after track of audio, multilayering harmony parts. Computers get ever more powerful, the process of recording a digital 24 \ 44 wav to disc however stays the same. You could pull a PC out of a skip and it would manage more audio tracks than you would probably need in a typical home project. 

Soft synths can use a fair bit of power if you use a lot of them but recording audio is not taxing for any PC. I'm only banging on about this because some people get put off recording because they don't think their machines are powerful to do it. 

digitalscream

@Danny1969 - very true. However, as I'm discovering now that I'm recording our EP with Amplitube 4...15 simultaneous guitar tracks all running AT4 is really rather taxing on the ol' CPU

That aside, I completely agree - if you're just recording the audio from a mic, then you definitely shouldn't need more than an i5 CPU these days. Far more critical is the hard drive speed and latency, which (for the average 5400rpm spinning-rust laptop drive) hasn't actually improved since about 2003.

digitalscream

robwright said:

robwright said:

Is this the kind of thing?

Doh! Cut and paste address and forgot to hit return?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Samsung-840Evo-250GB-SSD-solid-state-drive-NEW-Boxed-SATA-/291586228400?hash=item43e3e4c0b0:g:0j0AAOSwI-BWGRJS

It looks like the same one you suggested. Great rice compared to a year ago!

That's the 840 EVO, whereas I suggested the 850 EVO. It's 10 bigger, innit?

Danny1969

digitalscream said:

@Danny1969 - very true. However, as I'm discovering now that I'm recording our EP with Amplitube 4...15 simultaneous guitar tracks all running AT4 is really rather taxing on the ol' CPU

That aside, I completely agree - if you're just recording the audio from a mic, then you definitely shouldn't need more than an i5 CPU these days. Far more critical is the hard drive speed and latency, which (for the average 5400rpm spinning-rust laptop drive) hasn't actually improved since about 2003.

Yeah but you can print the tracks in Reaper, you don't need them running Amplitude once you have chosen the patch .... keep the raw track in the playlist anyway for each part in case you want to change the patch later though .... that's what I would do

digitalscream

Danny1969 said:

digitalscream said:

@Danny1969 - very true. However, as I'm discovering now that I'm recording our EP with Amplitube 4...15 simultaneous guitar tracks all running AT4 is really rather taxing on the ol' CPU

That aside, I completely agree - if you're just recording the audio from a mic, then you definitely shouldn't need more than an i5 CPU these days. Far more critical is the hard drive speed and latency, which (for the average 5400rpm spinning-rust laptop drive) hasn't actually improved since about 2003.

Yeah but you can print the tracks in Reaper, you don't need them running Amplitude once you have chosen the patch .... keep the raw track in the playlist anyway for each part in case you want to change the patch later though .... that's what I would do

Yep, that's what I'm going to do when I can't stomach my CPU hitting 68 degrees while rendering. Thing is, it offends me that my (admittedly 7 years old) Core i7 should struggle with such things

kin

This thread has me wondering,I have a Samsung all in one computer.

The specs are; ( and this means next to nothing to me, so,sorry if I've left something important out)

intel (R) Pentium (R) CPU G645T@2.50GHz

Ram 4.00GB ( 3.8 GB useable)

64 bit operating system, x 64-based processor

Will this be enough to run the likes of Amplitude, ezy drummer, Omnisphere  and Reaper?

I would only be recording one track at a time.

digitalscream

It should be, but the CPU will likely be a little bit limiting - it's nowhere near as powerful as an i3 or i5, to my knowledge. Amplitube, EZ Drummer and Omnisphere can be a bit power-hungry if you end up with a lot of tracks without freezing them.

kin

Thanks, I suppose I've lost nothing if I give it a go. Having said that, if this pc isn't up to the job can I re-install anything I buy like amplitude onto a more powerful one?