I need a new laptop. Do gigahertz actually matter?

Terry_42, post: 21488, member: 1843 wrote: If you do not do heavy VJing or have many programs running in parallel it does not matter at all.
Any entry laptop will do.
More important is you have a system that won’t crash. I use a 4 year old MacBook pro and I guess it will do another 2 years before I replace it. It runs all DJ programs with ease and I can even have Ableton running in parallel if I wish.

This is partially correct. I would not agree with saying an entry level laptop will do but you don’t have to spend too much to get a semi decent one that will be fine for regular mixing. When you get in to the more intensive stuff like running more decks, keylock, chaining effects etc it actually becomes quite CPU intensive.
There is a big difference from using a top of the line machine that a few years old compared to an entry level machine thats new. Your 4 year old MBP would probably outperform the majority of entry level (Windows) laptops.
Don’t only go off the specs though…quality + design should be a concern too. Theres a reason why Macs are expensive and not necessarily the highest spec’d machines, but are what you will find the majority of established DJs using.

Getting the highest spec’d processor you can afford is important but even more so is having plenty of ram. The larger the hard drive the better. A Solid state hard drive will be faster too but this is usually only found in high end machines and is pricey. Again, it should be a quality machine. If its got great specs but is really cheap then chances are it uses low quality components. These typically have issues, break or don’t perform to the quoted specs.

As someone who grew up Windows and for almost two years used a Windows laptop for Traktor Pro, I say if you can afford it, get a Mac.
I recently switched to a 13″Mac Book Pro and it was very refreshing to just install Traktor, connect my controller. Set my preferences and hit play.
The only optimisation I did was was turn off the screen saver and wifi before playing.