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Hello all!

Got a question about laptops. I am putting together a home/mobile studio. I plan on using a firewire interface into a laptop, but I have never worked with firewire or even owned a laptop before.

What should I be looking for in a new laptop? What RAM, processor speed, etc. do I need? I also see that some recommend an Express Card Adapter even if the laptop is equipped with a firewire port, so any suggestions on that?

Just from lurking around here for the last day or two I have learned a lot already about how I am going to set this studio up. Thanks.

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Comments

cfaalm Sat, 07/18/2009 - 09:43

With a firewire interface, then you'll need at least a FW port. Make sure the FW chipset in your laptop is compatible with your interface. You might have to dig real deep to get the facts. Don't be afraid to mail the manufacturer if the information is unavailable on the www. Just don't trust the guy you buy the laptop from. He'll tell you anything, unless he is specialized in DAW-laptops.

CPU: get the fastest you can afford, unless you only track on the laptop and do the editing at home on a more powerful desktop.

RAM: Get the most you can afford, at least 2GB, but 3GB won't hurt.

Now this is often overlooked but very important: :!:
You will also need an external drive to record on. A laptop usually has only one drive, being the system drive and you do not want to record on the system drive. Now unless you can postpone until USB3.0 is out, I'd look for a laptop with an eSATA port. It will be just as fast as an internal SATA drive. For the drive itself, look for the best $/GB ratio and as large a cache (16-32MB) as possible. I think the sweetspot is now 1TB.

The vanilla Macbook doesn't qualify, the MacBook Pro might, but I'd rather buy another, Windows based, laptop because it will be richer featurewise for that money.

TheJackAttack Sat, 07/18/2009 - 11:14

Either a Mac Pro or a good Windows computer will work. Just assume you'll need an Express Card or internal PCI/PCIe firewire card since 99.99999% of in-built firewire chips won't work properly. As to specs, in the computer world what is high tech today will not be in 15 min. Mainly check for compatibility issues with your DAW and equipment provider.

anonymous Thu, 10/01/2009 - 07:21

I guess this realy isn't my place to say this but I'm going to say it anyway: this is not a general computer help forum, it is a recording forum; hense the URL! And asking a question about how to get connected to the Internet is rather irelevent because you should not be surfing the web on your DAW machine anyhow. I just wanted to point this out... Wrong forum yo!

[edit by mod] The post in question has been deleted.

Space Thu, 10/01/2009 - 07:31

LifeWithoutPurpose,

It is/was spam. A common occurrence where a "poster" will type some mindless crap that reads like it means something. The important part, to the spammer, is getting a "link" on the page as the search engines love to crawl these and it is more helpful than hurtful to the spammer.

It will most likely be modified soon as the Mods seem to be on top of this concern.