[aktif]

Macs with a sticker over the apple symbol are best. +10 horsepower

Fact.

[justin]

Go on craigslist and buy some drug addicts barely used macbook pro. You can get a nearly new LOADED one for under $1400 and it will be a much more pleasant experience in the end. You get what you pay for, but it's always best to take advantage f other peoples misfortune when buying high end gear. 😉

This is a good idea and if you don't wanna do the whole shady laptop deal thing in the Target parking lot you can always buy from the Apple refurbished store. Great deals show up on there and they come with 1 year warranty with the option to purchase applecare (not like I would ever get applecare) Bad thing is sales tax.. booooo sales tax 🙁

[Nameless One]

Production probably requires some power but DJing… not so much.

Since I am dirt poor I took on a hand-me-down Dell, shoved a new HD and some RAM in it (total: $200), and haven't looked back. Oh, I'd like something better, but I've not had any problems DJing with it.

I almost took out a loan to buy a newer model for about $1500… it would have been cash wasted and I wouldn't have even known!

[psycosisgenerator]

I haven't dug into mac's much. But I run only usb controllers, and midi out to my hardware.

Windows does seem to have some issues passing midi out to hardware via midi from my experience, especially after XP (never had so many silly issue before I “upgraded”).

Some things from my experience to look out for –
How big of a monitor do you need – I.e how good is your vision? I don't like squinting to check on controls or to see if I dropped something in the right place so I opted to go big here.

Speed is mostly relative at this point between Intel and AMD processors as far as I can tell. Outside of running the hungry O/S I haven't seen any real discernible difference. Dual, Triple, Quad core and whatever up from there does make a difference, but also increases power consumption.

Ram is a much larger factor in my opinion. This has always made a much larger difference in the performance of any machine I have run than upgrading processors.
Checking prices to go up from my 4 to 8 gigs I see that it actually costs nearly twice as much to get 2 – 4 gig DDR2 sodimms than to get DDR3's.

Harddrive bays. You might not want an extra spot open or think you need it. I suppose much of this depends on  how you track your productions. I do a lot of mixing down parts and additional processing from there, and that adds up faster than you would think. Especially if you like to keep things around for later.

My last and currently biggest problem is laptops tend to have sh!t for ports to use. Works fine unless you have 6 midi controllers and hardware soundcard. Some stuff works fine on powered usb hubs, adds some latency but they still work alright. Some stuff will just refuse to work through a hub. I also have an express card port, but this port does not provide any usb power for a card to use, so it ends up being close to useless on its own.

— I will say that Mac o/s's tend to be much more stable though, always something to keep in mind. You do have more limitations with a Mac, but things tend to give you much less in the way of mind crushing headaches for seemingly simple problems. Although once you work your way through those windows issues you will have a fairly stable platform with usually more options for expansion. They are also cheaper to replace should you or someone drop it or something catches on fire.

Pluses and minus everywhere, the biggest thing is what you and your bank account are more comfortable with at the end of the day.

[psycosisgenerator]

For djing on the other hand, depending on whether or not you use lossless audio will probably be the biggest factor.

No lossless – pretty much any old thing will hold up to a point. Especially if you have your songs cached into your softwares memory.

Lossless you are probably going to want something you can load up with some ram, I would go 3-4gig minimum.

[Author]

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