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anonymous 30 September 2005

No plugins or ediiting needed, I plan to transfer recorded tracks to my home PC DAW for editing. I simply want something mobile to record 8 tracks max at 44.1/24bit (for drums, guitar, bass)

Can you get away with 256 Meg, less than 7200rpm harddrive, and 400 FSB? A low end Inspiron 6000 Dell selling now for around $600.

Or am I being too much of a tightwad ? :)

Theron D

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iznogood Fri, 09/30/2005 - 14:35

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anonymous Fri, 09/30/2005 - 14:45

thank you thats good to know. I was planning on using an external firewire/usb harddrive that was 7200rpm. Also from what I am reading I will keep my audio card hookup the opposite of my harddrive hookup ie if the harddrive is usb, then my soundcard will be firewire or vice versa....

theron d

iznogood wrote: ANYTHING will record 8 tracks of 24/44.1... even a 4.200rpm in a 1GHz machine... if not it's broken

John Stafford Sun, 10/02/2005 - 19:02

You might like to check out the chipset on the laptop you are interested in. I don't know about the current range, but in the past, Dell have used less common chipsets for peripherals. I'm not suggesting that these are in any way inferior, but some equipment can have some difficulties with less well known USB, Firewire, PCMCIA interfaces. In 99.99% of cases you should be ok.

John Stafford

ghellquist Mon, 10/03/2005 - 00:07

The specs are absolutely fine for what you want to do.

You will want to tweak a few things here and there though. Things like turning of power saving features, turning off screen saver, turning off internet while recording, turning off antivirus while recording, perhaps removing a few odd programs that might be included in the distribution. All these things will help the system to be stable.

An internal 4.200 rpm disc is quite sufficient for recording 8x44.1x24, in fact that is what I use myself. I tend to partition the disc into one partition for OS and program and another for sound files. I empty the sound file partition before every session, by moving the files to external storage (USB or FW both works fine for me). Defragmenting the sound file partition makes things better. Generally keeping the PC clean is a good thing.

FW400 has loads of bandwidth compared to what you are planning to do. It would not be the bottleneck.

Sadly enough there has been all kind of compatibility problems between sound cards and computers. You cannot really be sure if it will work, but generally a modern computer should not be a problem.

As for the sound card, once you are getting closer, do check out the exact problems with that card and if at all possible do run a real world test.

Gunnar

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