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Laptop or PC?


Chiwalker
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Hey everyone,

This summer I plan on getting a new computer / laptop so I can take my music and work more seriously. After messing around with the FL demo on this current comp, I can see it is something that I want (need) to explore more.

In everyone's opinion should I get a laptop (I will need one for college this time next year anyway) with pretty good specs...or...I could get a used comp for $700 from my friend - specs are very nice - but it is a P4 processor that is two years old.

Or should I have my friend build me a new computer completely?

Lets say budget is $1200 for the comp or laptop (doesn't include programs and other fun stuff)

So just vote - Laptop, New PC, or Used PC

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Your friend must have a bunch of damn good shit in that box of his to be charging you $700 for it. I'm talking 2 gigs of ram, two big hard drives, and two CD/DVD burner drives or something like that. If not, I think the used computer is a rip-off.

I'm partial to desktops just because it's easy to upgrade. If you want to mess with music, you'll want a nice sound card. You'll also want to be able to max out the memory if you can.

For college, I'd say just get a cheap, used 500MHz CPU laptop for word processing, and that'll set you back about $100 bucks.

So basically, build your own desktop and buy a cheap laptop so you get the best of both worlds.

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I am not too sure how resource heavy FL Studio and other audio or mixing software are. zircon's upgrade (which was a while ago) seems to leave me with the impression that mixing, at least a decently high level of mixing, will require some good hardware. Lots of RAM (good speed too) and a fast processor are necessary, and by extension probably a hard drive that can keep up as well. I think that I overheard someone in the OCR irc chat mention having to wait days for something to render on an old desktop. Of course that was months, possibly years ago, but that doesn't sound too great. For anything resource intensive, I would stick to the desktop. Laptops are meant to be used casually, which will then extend their lifetime too. Generally, laptops are more expensive than desktops and you might as well squeeze as much as you can out of your money.

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So what I'm getting out of this is - Get a good comp with high memory and good sound card (which is what my friends computer has) + a cheap laptop.

He offered me his comp + a cheap-ass 4+ year old Dell laptop for $750 with all his good specs but without a monitor which I will spend prolly $200 dollars for a 22 inch.

So the new question is

$950 for a good comp + laptop = good deal?

(The P4 processor is the only thing that sets me back on the comp, but do I really need more than that as long as I have good memory?)

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He offered me his comp + a cheap-ass 4+ year old Dell laptop for $750 with all his good specs but without a monitor which I will spend prolly $200 dollars for a 22 inch.

Just build a new rig

You can easily build something that will kill whatever he has for $750.

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Just build a new rig

You can easily build something that will kill whatever he has for $750.

Tried it - $1200 and that is possible for me, but I just don't want to spend that much (that was w/2g ram, good graphics card, core 2 duo, 250g hard drive)

However, I may reconsider the build my own thing because I will be making some money this summer...

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I'd stay away from buying something with a Pentium 4. My dad's desktop is an older one with a 3 GHz Pentium 4 and a gig of ram, and while using Sonar 7 on it things were going fine with CPU usage until I added my recently aquired East West Stormdrum to the mix. My CPU useage immediately jumped from about 10% to over 55% at some points. The only thing we can figure is the small cache size was holding it back. Pentium 4's have decent clock speeds, but their caches aren't as large as current processors and can hold them back.

And are you sure you can't build something through Dell or another company for less than $1200? I just went on Dell.com and built an Inspiron desktop with a Quad-Core and a 17" Monitor for about $949, and a Core 2 Duo for about $829. They didn't have the best graphics card, but it was decent, and they had 2Gb of Ram and a 500 Gb HDD. You'd probably spend as much or more if you buy your friends computer and have to get a monitor. $750 for his desktop just isn't a good deal at all.

If you have the know how to build your own machine then you could always look for good deals on parts on Ebay and put together something even better for about the same price. I'd say definitely get a desktop now and get a cheap laptop a little later when you're going to school.

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Tried it - $1200 and that is possible for me, but I just don't want to spend that much (that was w/2g ram, good graphics card, core 2 duo, 250g hard drive)

However, I may reconsider the build my own thing because I will be making some money this summer...

What exactly does he have other than a Pentium 4?

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  • 1 month later...

So here are the specs...

EVGA 9800 GTX video card

250GB Seagate hard drive

450W power supply (Corsair)

Gigabyte intel motherboard

Core 2 Duo

Really nice Antec P182 Case

Chimei 22" Widescreen

Windows XP

2 GB memory

1 DVD burner

Logitech mouse

Saitek Eclipse (blue glowy) keyboard

all that for $1400

Tell me what you think :mrgreen:

I need suggestions for speakers...nothing too fancy (I'll probably go to Office Depot and get a cheap $25 pair because for good sound quality I rely mainly on my Bose noise-cancelling QuietComfort 2 Headphones)

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So here are the specs...

EVGA 9800 GTX video card

250GB Seagate hard drive

450W power supply (Corsair)

Gigabyte intel motherboard

Core 2 Duo

Really nice Antec P182 Case

Chimei 22" Widescreen

Windows XP

2 GB memory

1 DVD burner

Logitech mouse

Saitek Eclipse (blue glowy) keyboard

all that for $1400

Tell me what you think :mrgreen:

Not bad, the only problem I see is the 9800GTX. Its not a bad card overall, but the newly released ATI HD4850 beats it for around half the price.

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Your friend must have a bunch of damn good shit in that box of his to be charging you $700 for it. I'm talking 2 gigs of ram, two big hard drives, and two CD/DVD burner drives or something like that. If not, I think the used computer is a rip-off.

Even with that kind of hardware it'd be a ripoff. 2GB of RAM is nothing these days.

Course, this is coming from the guy who has 8GB in his rig. :D

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Buy an EEE-pc for laptop duties, and build a desktop.

Second recommendation of EeePC.

And I cannot believe I'm saying this but, if your uni has a WPA2-encrypted wireless using PEAP I cannot recommend the linux version of the Eee - I've never been able to get it working quite right. Probably I don't have the appropriate certs in place or something similar, but the PEAP setup is fairly straight forward with windows and the latest Eees have XP preloaded (yes, that shits me).

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Second recommendation of EeePC.

And I cannot believe I'm saying this but, if your uni has a WPA2-encrypted wireless using PEAP I cannot recommend the linux version of the Eee - I've never been able to get it working quite right. Probably I don't have the appropriate certs in place or something similar, but the PEAP setup is fairly straight forward with windows and the latest Eees have XP preloaded (yes, that shits me).

I have absolutely no clue what you just said...but thanks.

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