Compatibility??

[grabeb]

I hope this is the correct area, if not please guide me.

My nephew received Protools 9.0 as a gift for Christmas and I've been put in charge of trying to help him get this installed. Problem is I don't know enough about the program, what it actually requires and what specifics I need to know about his PC. I've visited the compatibility section on the site, but again, am not sure what all he really needs.

What I do know is his current setup via him is:
Vista Home Premium
Intel R Core TM 2 Duo CPU (hope that's correct) E7500 @ 2.93GHz
3 GB RAM
32bit OS
356GB available on a 450 GB Hard Drive

I believe his sound card is a Realtec high def audio.

From that can anyone tell me what he definately needs to get this up and going? If that PC isn't adequate we also have a Dell Optiplex 745 which might be useable, but I don't on hand have all the specs of it.

My guess is he needs to upgrade to Win 7....is that true? It also seems to state he needs a seperate HD.....is that true? If so, could I partition the current one to work or what about a USB HD? Then lastly, I'm taking it that his audio card isn't up to speed, but I'm curious about the M-Audio Fast Track USB Sound card, that seems easy enough.

So does he really need all of that stuff? What about anything else? Keep in mind he's a 17y/o kid who won't likely be using this to it's full potential at this time, he just wants to play around with it and be able to use what he got for Christmas 4 months ago.

Thanks for any help!!

[nst7]

Someone with more knowledge about Windows will hopefully chime in about the computer.

As for the hard drive, for Windows, a usb hard drive is fine, and needs to be a 7200 rpm drive. Recording to a separate drive is very much recommended for Protools. If your computer will take another internal drive, that would be even better.

Regardless of what computer you use, the minimum ram you want is at least 4 gigs.

The Fast Track is nice, but if you can go a little higher, check out the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, or for a little more, the Fast Track C400, Focusrite Scarlett 8i6, or Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6.

[jimmyl]

You can run pt9 on win xp but its tricky. I did for a few months,but i just got lucky as I had a Avid recommended computer,Dell. You will be far better off to bump up to win7 and save you some grief. The upgrade and install is easy. Yes you need a 2nd hard drive usb is fine. If you want to use win xp, you should do it from a completely clean hard drive, like a new one, install win xp onto it. See, way too much trouble, win7 is the way to go. Plus it will lesson the calls you will get every time there is a crash

[grabeb]

Originally Posted by nst7

As for the hard drive, for Windows, a usb hard drive is fine, and needs to be a 7200 rpm drive. Recording to a separate drive is very much recommended for Protools. If your computer will take another internal drive, that would be even better.

Regardless of what computer you use, the minimum ram you want is at least 4 gigs.

The Fast Track is nice, but if you can go a little higher, check out the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, or for a little more, the Fast Track C400, Focusrite Scarlett 8i6, or Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6.

Not sure if he has room for an aditional drive, but I'll check. I may actually have an old one laying around.

I thought memory was a minimum of 2G's, 4 preferred. I believe he said he had 3G's, but I'll check and see if I can't bump that up to 4 easily.

Can I ask what makes the other sound cards better? I'm not the one paying for them and I don't want to say money isn't a huge issue, but at the same time the upgrade, possible memory, HD and a sound card upgrade is already going to cause this to be way more than planned. Just trying to weigh the pros and cons.

Thanks and will these things get him going? ....or are we still missing out on anything, like the video card, etc.....

[grabeb]

Originally Posted by jimmyl

You can run pt9 on win xp but its tricky. I did for a few months,but i just got lucky as I had a Avid recommended computer,Dell. You will be far better off to bump up to win7 and save you some grief. The upgrade and install is easy. Yes you need a 2nd hard drive usb is fine. If you want to use win xp, you should do it from a completely clean hard drive, like a new one, install win xp onto it. See, way too much trouble, win7 is the way to go. Plus it will lesson the calls you will get every time there is a crash

I don't really want to be messing with it the way it is, but it's my nephew so I'm willing to help. With that said, I'm going to strongly recommend Win 7, as I don't really want to start his PC from scratch unless I end up using the Dell Optiplex 745, as it already needs to be reformated!

[nst7]

The Fast Track USB is a very old product with limited features. He will outgrow it very quickly. For not much more, the other ones will have better sound quality, lower latency, and more features.

[grabeb]

Well, this had gotten put on hold, but I'm back on this again. I ordered the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 audio card. Having a bit of trouble finding a decently priced 7200rpm hard drive. I haven't had a chance to go look at his PC, but he doesn't think he has room for a 2nd internal one.

Is there any reason I have to have a 2nd hard drive and that it HAS to be 7200rpm?

......as I'm typing this I have been going back and looking through the Requirements FAQ page and see two drives listed. It seems the one is reasonable as far as cost/budget, so I'll look into that, but I'm still curious.

Other than that, I will be buying a win 7 upgrade, but may see how it handles on his 3gigs of RAM. If problematic, I'll look at upgrading that as well!

***Edit***
I have also been looking for a 2nd HD for myself and think I've settled on a Toshiba that is on sale from Office Depot for $120. My needs are just for movie/TV storage, but the reason I post this is that in one of the reviews the reviewer said he purchased his to hold the massive files from his music recording software, which is Pro Tools 10. He states it has worked flawlessly so far. Is there any reason that it shouldn't work for my nephew as well with Pro Tools 9 or do they have different requirements? It is only rated at 5400rpm's.

[grabeb]

Here is the drive I am looking at.

[YYR123]

Originally Posted by grabeb

is there any reason I have to have a 2nd hard drive and that it HAS to be 7200rpm?.

Well if u wanna record then yes it has to be - then again if u wanna have all kinds of -disk errors b/c ur computer can't keep up with reading and writing data - then no it doesn't have to be 2 drives

That being said - if u have a session with 4 tracks u may not have a problem with a slower drive - "May Not" - it u have 30 tracks and recording at 96k - forget about and go get Garage Band - PT isn't worth ur time if u don't have a machine that will handle the needs - u will chase ur tail and in the end be pissed off at Avid for selling such software - just saying - I'm a happy Avid customer - I have 3 internal drives 32mb and 64mb caches and 6gb transfer rates on all of them - 3 -TB's - WD Black's and if they sold 10k rpm I probably would have bought them - 100 bucks on eBay - NIB