So I am looking to buy a laptop or netbook to run Renoise. Ideally I would like a high end laptop which I could also run Serrato Scratch on. But for the time being I am considering a decent netbook to hold me off till I can afford it.
What are your recomendations? What shouuld I look for and what should I stay away from? Or better yet. What do you use and how do you like it?
Less and less I am trusting internet reviews. I’ve always hated HP products but they seem to be gathering the best reviews. I’ve always been drawn to Sony products mostly for their sleek design. But also for the fact that when I saw Vsnares play he was using a Sony.
Truth is I’ll probably be happy with whatever I buy if it’s shiny enough.
I had a mac once and wasn’t all too happy with it or their customer cervix. If I did buy a mac I would probably buy it through my sisters name. Girls seem to have better luck getting product care than dudes. My sister just walked into a apple store with her broken iPad and said “I dropped this.” And they were like “No problem. Here’s a new one.” I walked in with a macbook which the screen stopped working on and they said “There’s a scratch on this. That’ll be $700.”
Whine whine.
I digress.
I’ll choose to stay away from mac for their keyboard layout. Which is another important thing for such a Hotkey heavy workflow.
If I was going to spend any serious money on a laptop again it would probably be a Lenovo Thinkpad of some description, quite possibly a T series.
Brief look on their website and seems they have some good offers on some of the smaller ones currently…
Did recently get an eeepc 1015 but still too early to really comment except to say netbooks are maybe a little small with such low screen resolution and you can’t expect too much snappiness from an Atom processor, even if it is dual core.
I just went through the same thing, Im holding off for a year or two more to get a fuck yeah laptop. The Lenovo Thinkpad x120e came highly recommended, most of them have a dual core amd zacate series e350 chip in them which has a built in radeon hd 6310 chip, so at least when your traveling and taking a break from tracking, you can watch netflix and youtubes in hd. However, I after reading forum discussions comparing HP’s dm1z to Lenovo’s x120e, I decided that for the price I would pay for a used x120e, I could get a brand new dm1z with a slightly better e450 chip off of amazon for 399 us dollars. Mine came with 4gigs ddr3 and like the x120e its expandable to 8gig.
So far I’m in love with the power of this little beast. All the renoise demos run smoothly with ample cpu to spare EXCEPT dblue’s demo }:F However, I heard from another netbook user that this demo does the same thing, but so far I haven’t ran into issues with my original compositions.
Best wishes finding a computer!
Lenovo X121e with Intel (rather than AMD version I believe they do too) is currently under half price in their own shop from the UK. Haven’t compared this against 3rd party suppliers though, but looks a good deal.
Sign up, put together your computer, then go to their main online store and check how the price compares. I saved a bunch. Just make sure to bookmark that page cause you can’t sign in to their regular site with the account you make on the barnes and noble one.
Also, mSata SSD with a clean W7 install and Renoise is so fast, love it . And frees up your stock hdd for samples and crap files.
Whatever you do, I wouldn’t buy a netbook, as you’d be better off investing that budget towards a laptop and dealing with some make-due POS until then.
Yea, but check around, I think they have multiple “discount” secret entrances laying around, hopefully there’s one for your region. It was worth the research to find it, saved a good amount…
I recently got an asus N55SF which is great and gives a lot of bang for your buck. I use it for web development, photo editing (lightroom) and renoise mainly. It handles having a lot of heavyweight apps open at once and is a nice size with a good screen.
It does have a bit of an issue with renoise though - if you press the volume or mute buttons then key ‘H’ (G#) gets triggered incessantly until you press H again. I’ve reported the issue to asus so maybe a fix will come one day. If you can live with that it’s probably the best value laptop out there.
. And frees up your stock hdd for samples and crap files.
Plus I am really going to have to get my current beast to survive another couple of years if I can!