What are the real minimum requiredment to run a good daw program on a laptop?

[Jon Silva]

Originally Posted by SecretSilencer

Sites such as ableton say that 1.5ghz and 1gb of ram is required to run the program, but how good? I'll answer that, not very good.

I want to buy a laptop that has a
Intel Pentium P6100 (which has 2 cores but no hyper threading), and 4GB ddr3. How far can I really go using a configuration like this to produce music. I usually have about a good 12-15 tracks in my music and some will be of samples, very few are actually recorded at this point because I sold all of my analog synths (very upsetting!), but vocals are recorded as well.

Are you kidding me? I'm making music on a G4 Power PC (Mac) with 1.6GHz and two processors. Logic 8 runs on that machine and the hardware is from 2005. Multicore CPUs were not even available back then.

This machine just laughs at 12-15 tracks, especially with some of them being audio files (as opposed to realtime synth plugs).

Any PC with two cores will do that easily!

Thing is: get more RAM and try Live again before buying a new machine. I assume you're on Windows so make sure you tweak your system by switching off unnecessary services (google will help you).

[Mardi Gras]

i could make music on my old windows laptop with 2gb of RAM just fine. It ran windows vista

[mikedunn211290]

You could easily record on this, just make sure you don't have multiple browser windows open for one (Chrome is a processing hog) and definitely look into upgrading rather then blowing a load of money potentially with no need.
I say though, after hitting over £900, go for a mac.

Mike

[crufty]

Imo two cores is not enough,..

[Pirate Sounds]

First of all you need to get a Mac, everyone knows you can't do anything creative on a PC. Second you need to max that baby out, if your wallet is not physically hurting then you haven't spent enough.

Then once you have you ultra expensive Mac you'll need to spend most of the day on Gearslutz telling other people to spend lots of money on things they don't need.

Now you can start making music like the pros.

[mikedunn211290]

Originally Posted by Pirate Sounds

First of all you need to get a Mac, everyone knows you can't do anything creative on a PC. Second you need to max that baby out, if your wallet is not physically hurting then you haven't spent enough.

Then once you have you ultra expensive Mac you'll need to spend most of the day on Gearslutz telling other people to spend lots of money on things they don't need.

Now you can start making music like the pros.

Only the real pros use macs man, everyone knows this.

[LolrusPl]

My $600 AUD thinkpad edge, with an i3 and 4gb ddr3 simply LOL's at my ITB production. At the moment I'm using the terrible onboard DX driver, and yet I still manage to have 40% CPU load at 16 soft-synth tracks chock-full of insert effects, 4 sends etc. I just froze a track then, and my usage is down to <10%.

ANY new computer will handle up to 20 soft-synth tracks without an issue (as long as it isn't a netbook), and many times that in audio tracks.

[LiveFromKyoto]

That depends, is it Logic?