Your laptop and what you think of it

DJ Hessler, post: 12072, member: 537 wrote: Just a few suggestions that might be of help on your cons:
If you don’t already do it buy a 1TB or 2 TB external HDD to back up with time machine and you will be covered a bit better….Even withs SSD you should do continuos backups IMO. I lernt the hard way…………

Get a Magic mouse if you does not have it and then you get one more USB port.
Also there is USB splitter that gets one port to two and they take no place at all that way you get 4 USB ports if that would be enough? Otherwise I agree that Apple is not that generous with their USB ports.

thank you for the advices 😀 i do have all of my critical data backed up daily on a 500GB drive though, only stuffs like DJ music, producing projects, work papers/essays etc. programs/OS/plug-ins are excluded.
i actually prefer the Mac trackpad to an external mouse. maybe that’s just me.
and i got the 10-port hub since i was afraid that the 4-port would provide enough power for my home studio setup (full of controller, MIDI keyboard, sound interface etc.) i am looking into buying a self-powered 4 port hub for portable use as well.
can’t stress how much we users want the Macbook Pro to have more USB ports. the 11″ Air has 2 ports, why can’t we have more?
cheers mate 😀

I am glad everyone likes their laptops but DJ Earful does not use a laptop to DJ with. He uses a rack mounted CPU. Let me explain why. Upgrade ability. His setup has four monitors, one for his DJ software, two karaoke one for the singer and one for the DJ and one to surf the internet to get new music on the fly. DJ Earful is known to have performed in two separate locations at the same time. Try doing this with a laptop. Now DJ Earful does have a laptop but it is only used the play music, not DJ.

Lew, post: 12078, member: 133 wrote: Late 2007 Macbook, 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB, 250GB
Favourite thing: CoreAudio so no faffing around with drivers for low-latency audio
Least favourite: Only 2 USB ports

Same as this, just 2,4GHz/ 160Gb 7200rpm. Thing is that with this hdd the thing runs HOT. Gotta get a ssd drive. Otherwise works like a charm for my use.

Fubar, post: 12334, member: 755 wrote: Same as this, just 2,4GHz/ 160Gb 7200rpm. Thing is that with this hdd the thing runs HOT. Gotta get a ssd drive. Otherwise works like a charm for my use.

Everyone having issues with heat 99% of the time its to do with your CPU heatsink vs Hard drive. Harddrives produce little to no heat. Often with older model laptops the air intake and outtake gets gunked up and less air is able to flow through your laptop to dissapate the heat from the heatsink. On every laptop there should be 2 sets of “grills” sometimes more…get a Can or 2 of Compressed air and blow the bejeezus out of them. Taking your laptop in to get cleaned is also not a bad idea, and relatively cheap. This can increase the lifespan of your laptop a great deal…by not cleaning…the overall temp of your cpu and laptop is higher and will cause your cpu/gpu to fail a lot faster.

SSD VS HD is more of a performace issue…and reliability…SSD have no moving parts and have the ability to access info much faster…overall increasing performance…they are supposedly more reliable…but im still on the fence about that one.

A late 2009 13″ MacBook Pro.

Best Thing: Too many – Long battery life, keyboard is backlit and joy to type on, OS, a good screen I can use all day, portability, it just works and I dont need to meddle with the OS, solid case, too much

Worst thing: Nothing, I’m truly happy with it :)))

Though screen size can be an issue with four decks, its easily overcome as I have the keyboard button mapped so that Traktor goes into browser view (decks minimised) so i can have more space to view tracks and a macro mapping on the controller to load the track into a specific deck and at the same time change the view to what it was before. Also I use 4 virtual desktops with apps to load into specific desktops, one for web browsing and files mangement, 2nd for itunes/spotify, 3rd for Traktor and 4th for Ableton. Then I switch swifty with either dock icons or the alt+arrow buttons. With these workarounds and full view mode it means screen size issue is overcome and I really appreciate the portability of my 13″ – I dont need the 15″.

I’ve got a 5 year old Packard Bell Easynote somethingorother.

Favourite thing? It’s indestructible. It’s had 5 years of: drinks, sand, heat, cold, wrong chargers, dropped from 8 ft, stuff launched at the screen, the laptop launched at other things, and lots and lots of dust.

Least favourite thing? It’s 5 years old, it’s getting a bit slow and outdated now. Can’t install windows 7. Ideally would buy a 2nd hand mac, but I can’t afford it.

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad (I can’t remember the model number right now).

I love the build quality. It’s made for punishment, and in our line of work that’s important. The internal metal frame can handle most of the punishment many other laptops cannot.

The hardware is top notch in my book. I rarely ever have a problem with it.

old backup that made dj’ing hell
– 2005 dell inspiron e1705 single core processor 1.2ghz, 80gb hd, 2gb ram, windows xp media center $1200 brand new at the time
good ridance

-brand new asus 15.6″ 2.0 quadcore i7, 500gb hard drive, upgraded to 12gb ram, nvidia geforce 5400
still tweaking it and getting all the drivers updated, but the best deal you could find for a laptop under $600 (*refurbished, $1300 brand new)

pros
-fast and lot of useful features to configure how to run laptop. i.e. speed, battery saving power, media, office use
all at the click of one button
-less than half the price of a macbook but just as fast, if not faster
-10 key keyboard

cons
-needs to be tweaked to run optimally, have to update all drivers
-for a 15.6″ its just as big as my 17″ dell, but lighter
-screen resolution maxes out at 1368×720
-weird lighting

i went with windows again because its what im familiar with, didnt feel like learning a whole new system and switching over to mac. not to mention i probably saved over a grand by doing so. and in all honesty i dont mind tweaking out my computer or spending time getting it to run optimally, i may even enjoy doing it a little bit.

Im fine with my computer, im not overly excited about it though. but it gets the job done and i can dj again hassle free. for everything else it does more than whats required. very nice