best pc laptop for serto

I wouldn’t necessarily agree with what A.D has put on most fronts…

AMD processors are not by default inferior to Intel – Indeed the desktop AMD processors offer the same performance for often half/a quarter of the price of Intel equivalents. I use one such processor in my gaming PC – £120 of AMD processor is equivalent to around £400 of Intel. No contest for me.

However – In laptops, AMD are behind Intel in terms of power usage and in terms of processor performance. AMD processors are also not officially supported by Serato – so in this instance I would looking at getting an Intel i5 (3rd Gen or higher) processor. (Btw, you can tell the generation of an Intel Processor from it’s model number – each one has 4 numbers, the first number is the generation. EG. i5 2430 <- This is a 2nd Gen intel i5 processor.)

Second is your Windows management. On my laptop (I only have 1 laptop and use it for everything, I just know how to set it up right – Mine is 5 years old now and quicker than a lot of new laptops – and it only cost me £400..) I manage everything very carefully. I run a program called CCleaner every month or so – this cleans up everything and removes temporary files etc. – and I keep my laptop hard drive clean at all times, by which I mean that I uninstall anything I don’t need any more, I run antivirus and I keep everything updated (apart from iTunes..).

I would run the latest version of windows (although give Windows 10 a few months to get the bugs fixed before you upgrade to it after it comes out soon) – I use 8.1 – and update it regularly. I would turn off auto-updating though.

In short – use your PC for whatever you like, but manage it. If you can afford to have another laptop just for DJing then go for it, but I know that I can’t and that I don’t need to.

Other hardware considerations are:

1) How much RAM? Many people DJ using 4GB of RAM (I would not recommend anything less) and they can perform fine. I upgraded my laptop myself to 8GB of RAM and wouldn’t change it back though. It is surprising how much faster your PC can go with such a cheap upgrade.

2) Hard drive. Do you want an SSD? if you do, can you afford one with enough storage to store everything on? HDD’s (or SSD’s) are much harder to upgrade than other components like RAM, especially in a laptop, so make sure you get this right at the start. Personally, I use a 500GB hard drive in my laptop and it just under half way full. This is plenty of space for me, but it may not be for you. An SSD is not necessary however – more speed can be gained from disabling programs running unnecessarily on startup than from getting a new SSD over a HDD.

I would also recommend getting a backlit keyboard on your new PC – you do not know how useful they are until you have tried one in a dark DJ booth!!

Other than that, I would google “How to optimize PC for Serato” – there will be instructions on there on how to make Serato run better. Do you common sense though – if you start going into “Regedit”, stay well away unless you know what you are doing and if they get you to disable something you might want to use, don’t disable it!! (EG wifi).

A lot of people will tell you to only use your Laptop for DJing – and there are arguments for it, and if I could afford to then I would. But it is not necessary. Manage your PC, learn how it works and then everything should work fine..

Hint: If you want us to recommend anything in particular, a budget may be useful.. 🙂

bob6397

Thumbs up to the backlit keyboard. Makes a huge difference – once you’ve used one you’ll never go back.

I have to side with Staz here. SSD is the single most important performance boost you can give your laptop/pc.

Apple MacBook only requires removal of the optical drive (who needs one nowadays) and a bracket to fit in that space that will hold an extra HD/SSD. So not too much hassle to have a “dope” solution.

As for the price of SSD’s, the idea that they are crazy expensive is a bit behind the curve these days. You can get a decent performer for around 35-38 cents a gig (250 gig running 85 -100 approx.). The faster high end ones can be had for around 125. 500GB from around 160 and up.

And while still not as cheap as regular HDs, they have two MAJOR advantages over HDs:
1) Speed. Noticeable from boot (laptops booting in 15-30 seconds), opening programs and reading tracks
2) NO moving parts! Don’t underestimate this one. Even if a drunken guest bumps into your DJ table hard and knocks your laptop half of it’s tray or -like happened to me a few weeks ago on a gig on a canal boat- the captain drives into the underside of the bridge, nothing will happen with your HD.

While modern HDs have all kinds of protection, if a disc is actually spinning when it’s jolted, chances of a severely (and I do mean (partially) beyond repair) crash are very real.

250GB should be fine to hold operating system, DJ software, music (if you have more than 2000 tracks in your core collection you need to rethink your strategy anyway, imho) and the odd bits and bobs that you might need.

As always, if you can’t dedicate a laptop to just DJ with, go for a dual boot system, giving you the option to boot into a DJ-only environment that you can fine tune for the purpose.