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Hey guys,

I have a budget of around £650 pounds to spend on a portable solution for music production.

I want to run Cubase 5 with around 6 or 7 VST's (battery, FM8 etc) and a load of vsti's as well.

What can people recommend me? Will I have to buy some kind of portable sound card as well for this laptop to be able to support audio?

I have heard that SSD drives are also the one to go for when choosing a hard drive.

Any ideas are welcome as long as they don't involve mac!

if you have a budget of £650 then forget ssd, it'll eat up half your budget for a decent sized one. any of the new intel sandy bridge chips are pretty awesome, for that budget you could get an i5. 4gb ram minimum, and don't worry about a video card as its not needed.

i use native instruments audio dj2 for my soundcard, was about £80.

personally i'd try to find a used macbook pro on ebay or something. can't go wrong with it

can't go wrong with a USED macbook pro off EBAY?? Are you having a laugh or what?

With that money you can get a fairly decent laptop brand new anyway.

Look about the net, should pick up a fairly decent machine for less!

get a machine. not a toy.
a desktop beast, not a laptop pet.

Save up and get a Macbook Pro mate.

I have a Acer Aspire 7736Z, it doesnt have any problems with running lots of Massive instances

You can get the same parts and specification in a windows machine for literally half the price of a macbook pro.

With Mac you are paying for the brand. I'm not spending my money on something just because it has an Apple logo on it...

LiveOnes wrote:You can get the same parts and specification in a windows machine for literally half the price of a macbook pro.

With Mac you are paying for the brand. I'm not spending my money on something just because it has an Apple logo on it...

I love you..

if it's a pc laptop you want, get an asus.

blinkesko wrote:I have a Acer Aspire 7736Z, it doesnt have any problems with running lots of Massive instances

This.

Acer laptops are affordable and reliable, had mine almost 2 years now, not a single problem, with your budget you shouldn't have any trouble finding a model that suits your production needs.

Also for all the mac users, he said he doesn't want a mac, so suggesting 'buy a mac' is probably not very helpful to the man. Stop forcing your weird 'one-mouse-button-upside-down-tool-bar' religion on people. You have better things to do anyway, like calling applications 'apps' to sound cool because apple told you to, or growing an ironic beard, wearing big headphones, or telling people you're writing a book that's 'like a novel, but more of a social commentary about consumerism and aesthetics' in starbucks...

You're the worst advertisement for your product of choice since flemmy smokers coughing up chunks of lung in A&E wards.

LiveOnes wrote:Any ideas are welcome as long as they don't involve mac!

apparently OP doesn't want help!

in all seriousness tho..
I'd save up for a mac.. PCs have fucked me every time.
I've have yet to have a problem with mac. Its well worth the investment for me!



but you say you have £650 to spend?
not sure about the exchange rate, but doesn't Cubase go for $500.. then komplete costs around $500 as well

Any PC laptop for that price will be decent these days just shop around and look for something that catches your eye. Have a look at the specs and see if they are up to your expectations. Soundcard is not necessary if you dont have any hardware... I have a usb midi controller and still no external soundcard and im fine with how its working. Dont worry about SSD's, seriously not worth it and definitely unecessary for production. Also I agree with you, dont go near a Mac (take note that I am writing this from work where I am a technician at an Apple service centre haha ). But yeah you've got a decent budget so just get what takes your fancy after you have looked around a bit and if you can i'd go with a desktop, but if its needs to be portable thats totally understandable. My HP laptop has always been good to me and would highly recommend them for it. Despite what others have said, I have had bad experiences with Acer's, but that was a fair few years ago now, maybe they are different now. Good luck with finding something

im going for this one me, i5 2.66 ghz processor, 6gb ram, 500gb hdd (only 5400rpm though :/) windows 7 premium £475

Edit: forgot link http://www.ebuyer.com/product/259336

That will be more than ample man. With a bit of cash left over for other goodies

coming from someone who has owned both an ACER and ASUS.

DO NOT BUY AN ACER. wow. they're like the least reliable laptops ever.

BUY AN ASUS. they are the most reliable pc laptops on the market.

RESEARCH. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... CatId=4938

bassinine wrote:coming from someone who has owned both an ACER and ASUS.

DO NOT BUY AN ACER. wow. they're like the least reliable laptops ever.

BUY AN ASUS. they are the most reliable pc laptops on the market.

RESEARCH. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... CatId=4938

The acer I have now is super reliable, nothing wrong with it after one year, everything goes smooth, no trouble

Apple and PC is all a matter of which operating system you are comfortable with nowadays. Like someone said above anything with an i5 or above will be MORE than enough for music production. I have a desktop PC (dell) running windows 7 with an i7 960 (which im sure you can get in a laptop now) and I havent even come close to maxing this thing out. Ive had photoshop, illustrator, a web browser with 20 tabs open and had ableton up and running with 40 or so tracks playing midi and audio and it didn't choke one bit. 3d renderings also a breeze, something that would have taken a day to render now only takes 10 minutes? Ive only ever seen the CPU meter(on my desktop) hit over 50% maybe twice the whole year ive had it. As far as make and model, I dunno. Ive heard good things about Asus models, of course macbook pros (if you have an extra 2grand laying around), dells. You shouldn't have any problems if you are mindful about what kinds of programs you install and how well you optimize everything.