Keep the laptop you have, it's fine for music. Get into a pcmcia audio interface of some kind (Hammerfall, Digigram, Echo, etc...) and a usb midi interface. I have an Inspiron5000 (P3-750, 256MB RAM, Win2k) and a Dell Latitude C610 (1GHz P3, 256MB RAM, Win2k) and plan on outfitting one of the two like this.
XP, btw, is not the greatest for audio apps as it introduces a huge amount of CPU overhead over Win2000. You can't run nearly as many VSTi's with XP as you can on win2000 (I've tried already). XP requires a Pentium2 300 just to get going. Win2000 requires a Pentium 133. I use both at work and I can say that WinXP is a lot slower than Win2000 on identical equipment. Out of curiosity, have you downloaded the very latest drivers for your equipment? If not, you may want to do that first. George Jones IV Technical Systems Administrator BBDO Detroit (248) 293-4780 -----Original Message----- From: Al Jones [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2002 3:04 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [313] laptop music makers: problems and more problems Hi techies, Based on some advice I received on this list, a few months ago I bought a Dell Inspiron 4100 (i gig pentium processor, 128 meg ram running Win 2K) PC laptop to do music with. Only now have I started to kit it out to do music. I thought that I would get a USB box for audio because they're cheap. First I got a Midiman Quattro (audio+midi) which didn't work in the way it was supposed to (driver problems) so I sent that back and got an Edirol UA-5 and a Midiman 2x2. The midiman box didn't work (my laptop certainly doesn't like Midiman...) and the recording on the Edirol is full of pops and noise and I've fiddled with it for ages with no resolution of the problems. Has anyone else experienced problems like this? When I spoke to the shop that I got these bits from, they told me that they have a lot of trouble with PC laptops and have known issues with many of these USB boxes. I think that I have two options: either get a PCMCIA card for the machine that I have (more expensive, possibly becoming obsolete? but more reliable than USB) or just get a Mac and start making music instead of playing around with control panels and audio settings. Agggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!! What do you think? Regards, Al --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
