Laptop for music making

Hi everyone,

I’m new here and looking to buy myself a controller.

I’m looking for a very basic, cheap controller (probably hercules control instinct), but they say that the minimum system requierements are CPU 1,5Ghz, and my lapotop only has 1,35Ghz. Is that a big problem? I have 4Gb Ram and 500Gb hard disc space so that shouldn’t be a problem.

I use this laptop for nothing else except surfing the net and fruity loops, and that works perfectly fine. (no gaming for exemple).

Thanks for the advice!

Grts

Many thanks DJ Vintage,

How exactly can I ‘look someone up’? I searched for it but didn’t found..

I have a computer tech background (A lot less DJing) so this is how I see it. I don’t like touch screens much unless its convertible to a tablet, even then I avoid it because if it ever goes bad its alot more expensive to fix. Instead I would go with a larger size screen. You can run it at higher resolution and have more screen real estate to work with. Don’t skimp on processing power or RAM. Basically get as much power as you can afford. If you ever get into production work or post-processing on videos/mixes you want as much processing power as possible, it is pure grunt work and more power can mean the difference between tying up your computer for 8 hours or 2 hours.

RAM upgrades are the most affordable way to increase performance on a computer, particularly when multi-tasking or running multiple programs. Pay attention to how many RAM slots there are on the board and what size modules were used to fill them up. Later you can upgrade to more RAM but if for example you only have two slots and they gave you two 2GB RAM modules instead of one 4GB RAM module, you have to throw them both away and buy two 4GB modules to get to 8GB instead of just one 4GB module.

If you think you might ever work with video you may want to get a laptop with a discrete graphics card. Most laptops use onboard video which suffices for most things but gets a little overloaded when you run multiple monitors or multiple instances of video. It’s not a deal breaker but if you can afford it and think you might get into 3D rendering for video samples, definitely consider it.

Right, a solid state hard drive(SSD) will have better access time and be more responsive than a conventional hard drive. It also has a benefit of being shock/impact resistant because there aren’t moving parts. The downsides are write time isn’t much better so it will take just as long to dump files onto the drive as a regular drive, you get less storage space than a regular drive of the same price, and the maximum capacity size is much lower than what’s available with conventional hard drives. For the most part though these are limitations rather than negatives, for DJing none of these are real issues so it’s hard to find a reason not to use a SSD.

Another alternative is to get a faster conventional hard drive. Normal laptop drives spin at 5400rpm but you can also get ones that spin at 7200 rpm like a conventional desktop drive or 10000 rpm hard drives. Performance increases with RPM but cost and capacity drops. A 7200 rpm drive is a good balance between improved performance and massive storage capacity. It’s more than necessary for a dedicated DJing machine but useful for a mixed usage laptop or if you do video work or production.