Looking For New Laptop And External Soundcard

any suggestions?
any good things to look for ?
any bad things to look for ?

im thinking about the M-audio audiophile audio interface and not sure about a brand of laptop.

tanks! B)

i’m planning to buy an M-audio audophile firewire

I currently sell my laptop on priceminister for 1600€

1.5’s resources are ridiculously high

i certainly wont waste much more of my time with these ppl

This seems only a laptop related problem.

And i don’t see many other users mentioning the same about using a lot of resources but ppl that have a laptop and also:not all of them.

It may be some centrino issues, but don’t know if the CPU opcode handling from a centrino is very different than that of an ordinary PIV or AMD CPU.

any suggestions for processor type ?

Hmmz, how about a Mac G5 :D You have more choice now :P (edit:No pun intended Choice :D)

I’m looking to stick with windows currently i have a dell and was thinking about toshiba??

man…the things i would do to a G5 :eek:

To choice
For me its not renoise that takes the CPU, its all of them damn VSTs :D

And also related to the discussion here. I recently borrowed a laptop
from my father, a Hewlett Packard AMD 2800+ and it has something
called “Powernow”, a feature that shuts the processor down to
“veeery slow-mode”, when not used much (like a few percent) for
saving power and keeping the processor cool so the cpu-fan can be
quiet.

But the thing is when i ran Unreal from 1999 it takes just a few %s it would
shut down, and slowing the whole game down, making
it "stutter. Game would powerup like 2 seconds and shutdown, oscillating
like a LFO. Needless to say, I got fragged.
And this was done when the powercord in place, not even on battery.

Now this may not be problem when writing word or excel but when gaming,
big problem. AND with Renoise, because when powering up the computer
would stutter or go slow for like 1/2 to 1 second. So every time you play
a sample, the processor would have to “rev up”.

The only way to disable this great “feature” of powernow (that shouldnt
even have been on when on the cord), after a week of searching the
forums was to remove the Windows XP driver for the processor.

And it worked like a charm after that. :walkman:

All laptops wont have this function, but some do, and maybe this will help
you :D

Cheers!
/The Mike

where did you find this info on Windows XP and what did you do to disable it?

I dont have the link still but I googled a good while for it then.

The way to remove the driver was just as usual, just go into the

control panel->system->device manager

And disable the driver. When on battery and you need it just enable
it again.

My recommendation for processor? I would go with a AMD mobile.
P4 Mobile will be faster in some benchmarks when comparing CPUs of same
price, but that is when it can use its hyperthreading. Renoise disables that
feature in the startup, handing good size advantage over to AMD.

And I do think the Mac is the best computer in many aspects but its a
luxury with quite price tag.

in case of laptop, don’t run down the processor-alley to much, you will hardly reach the borders of a modern processor anyway unless you use dozens of vsts…

much more important is the speed of your harddrive, where all your audio is streamed from/to. problem is most manufactures give you lame 4200 drives only, which is pretty annoying cos you’ll get crackles and shit no matter what processor/ how many ram you have. so look carefull that you get a decent drive, it will cost you some quid but you’ll be happy to have payed that…

basicly for that reason i got me one of those dell precision m60 workstations. had to bleed quite a bit for that but it was worth really. got a 7200 drive now, i only have a 2GB Pentium M, and the thing is a monster. allmost impossible to get it buggy under normal circumstances…

my current computer is p4 (non hyper threaded) with 1 gig of ram
and im assuming the HD is 4200.

So are you telling me that my cpu is maxing out b/c of the HD speed?
b/c otherwise my system should be able to havdle 2 vsti’s and some native renoise effects.

suggestions for non clipping/glitching audio?

your HD should be absolutely idle during playback of a song, which only features some native effects + couple of VSTi.
as long as everything fits into your physical memory, the harddrive won’t take any effect on your performance.

i’ve got two 10.000RPM SATA harddrives in a Raid-0 Array (WD Raptors) and renoise isn’t even 0.01% faster than it was with my previous 7.200RPM setup (i’d be surpised if it would anyways)

what two VSTis are you running there that are maxing out your CPU?

i mean, its absolutely possible to max out a 4Ghz P4 or Athlon64 4000+ with just one VSTi…
just play some chords with an adequate synth in unision with high voice count and even these systems will start crying…

i was able to disable this on my thinkpad t23 by going into the services and disabling ibmpmsrv for both of my profiles and i must say renoise has ran soo much better, thanks sooo much Mike!
now i can get back to killing sound :drummer:

the VSts i am using are:

NI Absynth 2
NI FM7

and some native renoise effects.
hopefully you can help me.

if your laptop is dynamically changing CPU frequency and you’d prefer being able to control it yourself, you might not wanna miss RMClock