Best windows laptop for £400 to £500 ?

whats wrong with taking the time to learn something new? the easy option (mac) isn’t always the best…

You make many good points there sir. I am the first to admit I’m a biased biggot when it comes to Apple Products. They scream evil to me. I don’t have facts on hand to back that up, and I regularly use google, and gmail. So.. yup. Thankfully I’m not a biggot in any other context.

Thank you for the +1 on the Lenovo, I will do some digging on the google machine and see what I can find pertaining to matte screens. Windows 8 imho appears to me like the b*stard child of android phones and apple products. so more or less the spawn of satan, so I’ll stick with windows 7. I’m only a few nerdy steps away from being a ubuntu user, but they’re steps I won’t be taking. 😛

As for tinkering, without tinkerers (e.g. Nikola Tesla) i.e. people that wish to fix things that aren’t broken, we would not have alternating current, instead stuck with DC. but I know you get the drive of the tinkerer so all good.

As for DJing, hell freakin yes. It feeds the same receptors in my brain that bootleg remixing does, but with DJing you can do mini mashup remixing on the fly, cull the parts of songs that are boring, manipulate the energy of the audience experience of hearing & feeling the set, combine genres that shouldn’t work together but do, and do it all in about 10 minutes during a live real-time set. its is extremely satisfying. almost as much as playing with my drillbit…..and tinkering ;P. Initially I will simply be recording live mixes possibly video also, from the home studio, to post on youtube, this is where I can experiment, and i look forward to it immensely, its just a matter of getting my record label up and running first. My current perspective on DJing in a club setting is that it would be purely a monetary venture for me & I am somewhat anxious that my eclectic taste in music won’t go down so well with club goer’s; at least not where I live, so maybe I need to find different clubs.
DJing at raves & outdoor festivals however is afar more appealing prospect to me at the moment. I love a good outdoor rave, psytrance & ambient dub culture especially.

Thanks for the interesting reply 🙂

Peace!

@Terry,

ah, think we’ve had a miscommunication somewhere.
I’m going to try to explain my perspective more holistically so bear with me if you can.

I have no beef with the busy bee’s working for either Apple or Microsoft. Its the head honchos that bother me, the ethics of the company as a legal entity (a non-human individual) that concern me. And its not necessarily just Apple I’m talking about here, but more broadly, anyone in a position of power who chooses to abuse the slew of new technologies on our doorstep, for their own selfish motives, or for which the actions taken harm others without concern, worry me also. Modern business practices in general tend to scare me quite a bit, planning when its profitable for your product to breakdown or become obsolete is an example of the practices I refer too.

Augmented reality, Televisions with camera’s in them which watch you whilst you watch the box (to better target the advertising during commercial breaks) video game consoles that require active internet connections, logging in every 24hrs, and motion sensor cameras that have to be on at all times in order for the console to work, etc. all paint a grim picture that we won’t see clearly until the technologies are here & develop further. I could go into this in length, but this isn’t the time or place. You’ll note Microsoft is among the developers of the tech listed there tho so this isn’t a fan-boy type argument. And I used to think Sony was evil! speaking of which I’m only partially serious using that term, absolutes are always absolutely wrong and should never be used…. 😉

Using tax havens (Ireland) I have mixed feelings about, though I lean towards it being a bad thing when profits are exceeding necessity. Though to due that topic justice I’d need to talk about my perspectives on the fraudulent global monetary systems as a whole and how these systems have changed over the last 100yrs, and that’s a massive discussion, again not the time or place.

Using cheap labor in china I have a big problem with tho, for e.g. the response from one Chinese apple factory upon reaching an unprofitable rate of worker suicides was to install nets so when they jump from the walkways they don’t die, and therefore reduces the liability of the factory. (can dig up a source for that if you wish) and the “if you want to work here, you must live in our overpriced housing & eat our overpriced food” policies at those factories don’t sit well with me either. While I’m aware that Apple is not directly responsible for this, they play a role & imho the right thing to do would be to find a factory whose owners operate like they actually have souls. And as a consumer, I’m willing to sacrifice convenience to save lives, and to have a choice, which seems to be at odds with the general consensus among consumers these days which seems to be sacrificing choice for convenience & a if it isn’t happening here it isn’t happening mentality, this is my perspective on the data mining industry & frakenfood’s (Monsato) too, which I’m not a fan of either.

Also there’s grey area when it comes to the ever simpler interfaces of technology in general. On the one hand, why should someone have to know every piece of ware on their pc/phone/tablet/etc, every nut bolt & component, just to send an e-mail or play flappy bird.

On the other hand, it makes it easier for companies to behave in a less and less ethical manner, and abuse the rights of their customers, when said customers are ignorant of what exactly they’re doing & how it actually works; and then of course there’s hackers & scammers, who do happen to know those nuts & bolts and having less users of said tech’ knowing what is possible with their tech, benefits the scammers to no end.

successful scamming due to a general lack of tech savvyness is a big problem here in Australia; and being the “she’ll be right” nation of the world, not being educated about this or that is a consistent cause of problems here, and this argument can be applied to the action-reaction dynamics between the public & the government too… tho like many other things I’m mentioning, that’s a story for another bonfire. Also I realize its not always practical to know the nuts & bolts, and we rely on the tech savvy to help the less tech-literate to avoid being scammed & the like.

I’m a fan of who the apple founders were back when they were inventing computers. much respect to them for that. And they had a playful yet for the most part harmless side too, hacking payphones with recordings of dialtones for free calls and such. Less respect to Bill for stealing their ideas.. I feel the same about Bill as I do many politicians…. though for what its worth, I think Bill has done a lot of good things and fights for some good causes even if I struggle to relate to how I perceive him to be.

So after getting off topic and all serious for a bit, let me get this derailed train back on track…

Why I prefer PC’s is because on a slim budget, when you need a monster of a PC for studio use, its easier to learn to build your own PC (fancy Lego) and simply update components as the years pass, then have to buy a new, ever more expensive desktop model apple, which cannot be tinkered with.

Being able to update only the components you need, and only out of necessity is good for the wallet.

Being able to install an OS and have that be the only thing on your PC is the sort of leanness needed for business level audio production work. Any extra performance that can be squeezed out of your gear to run those resource hogging VSTs is a godsend when you just want to get on with music creation, and reducing bloatware is a good way to achieve it. So being as DJing is secondary to my main needs as a producer, I cannot speak in terms of what is best as a DJ, though I’d agree that whatever barriers between you and the creative process you can remove/bypass, the better, so in that regard, I begrudgingly admit that apple is more suitable. However if you know windows, knows pc’s and then get into djing afterwards, I see no need to change, though I can understand why people might want & choose to change their setups anyway.

Anyway I hope you understand where I’m coming from, sorry for getting a bit carried away there & hopefully you found it a thought provoking read 🙂

Peace!

Very good points Alchemy, I love such discussions in such a fashion 🙂

The problem however is even more severe.
Apple just happens to be in the spotlight. While I am on board with you blaming the problems at Foxcon and what happened there, the thing is that this just happens to be ONE view on a company that is currently in the spotlight. While it is bad, most things are worse.

Take for example Shoes and Shirts. Most of these things do not even come from such an advanced place as China (yes in the Asian region they are advanced when it comes to work ethics). They come from Kambodscha or Vietnam, where in fires and sometimes through simple overworking in heat conditions far exceeding what is human, workers die by the hundreds.

The good thing, and let me stress this, is however it is US, yes WE the people who can change that. It is sometimes very uncomfortable for someone to do that and while I am not perfect (I use Macs…) here are some things that I did to improve on this:
– I do not own a Television (yes indeed)
– Hence I do not own a gaming console
– I only buy shoes which are manufactured locally or where I exactly know where they come from (my sneakers are made in New York and yes they cost a bunch…)
– I only buy fabrics from companies that I know where they come from. Yes my jeans probably cost triple of most peoples, but I love them and know nobody died for them
– I only buy organic vegetables from local farmers
– I only buy organic meat and meat products from local farmers
(Yes it is out of my control if I eat out, but at least at home I can do it.)
– I try to minimise plastic (aka buy water in recycled glass bottles etc.)
– My gear bag is custom made from San Francisco… yes it costed a fortune…
and many more things…

If enough people do this, then in time economy will go our way. For example here in Austria we already see that in the food markets. Since so many Austrians did buy directly at farmers that cheap imported meat was rotting in the markets… the markets now carry local meat products and you actually have a hard time finding anything imported…

Yes to make this happen is a hard thing to do. I never imagined I could live without a TV. Also many things do cost much more (but thankfully many things like jeans and shirts also tend to hold up against time much better) and you sometimes have to take a step back and buy less than you used to…

But one cannot blame the companies. If everyone cries computers have to be cheaper and cheaper, there is no way around producing them in China. If you ware willing to pay 4000 dollars for a notebook like 20 years ago, I am sure Apple would make them in the US again. If everyone stopped buying cheap (or sometimes even not so cheap) Vietnam made Sneakers… problem solved as the companies would go out of business. That is the fate we have to live with in capitalism. However it is the evil within us and the “I want everything” attitude of ourselves that drive the markets.

@Vintage..

that’s just the magic of the derailment train my friend.. one person references star wars.. another starts using Australian slang & hacking payphones… boom! off topic. 😀

@djrick, I should mention that if you midi controller djing hardware has its own ASIO interface, (like my G2V has) best to use it over any others to avoid conflicts, even if it is usb connected, switching to firewire isn’t the only way to solve lag, faster processor can solve the problem too…

also razer game booster can be used to boot Traktor, and will automatically suspend unneeded background windows services freeing up more ram for Traktor to use, then when your finished, close traktor and exit razer game booster and the suspended services become active again. Just a suggestion.. might be a placebo that one…