Help with kid's studio rig

[JoeyF]

My young teen son is a musician and he wants to piece together a small studio to record his band. First, let me say, we own two pro studios with Mac's and PTLE in one, PTHD in the big one...BUT I'm not a PC guru. My dad gave the kid a $3,000 credit card at Dell for Christmas and he's going nuts to use it. I know you guys say Dell is crap but if he buys a Dell Studio XPS 9000 is he wasting his credit? If so, can Dell do a custom DAW for the money?

[necjamc]

Afriend of mine recently built a studio around a m-audio setup and a dell computer. I gave him every piece of advise I knew and he spent weeks researching the computer. It's seems like a good machine but I hardly spend time with it.

What I do know though, You obviously have PT knowledge, So make sure they listen to your requests. They were not very helpful with my friends, He wanted XP because it came with Vista 64, and they gave him a hard time, but did it in the end. Just push the salesman to get the best machine that YOU believe you need.

Edit: I also run a Dell inspirion laptop for mobile stuff, It's OK but one thing I noticed about DELL is the Dell Dock (Looks like a Mac Idea) and It consumes alot of CPU. As well as other things they install. It took a lot to weed them out but I got it working pretty good.

[DeyBwah]

Originally Posted by JoeyF

My young teen son is a musician and he wants to piece together a small studio to record his band. First, let me say, we own two pro studios with Mac's and PTLE in one, PTHD in the big one...BUT I'm not a PC guru. My dad gave the kid a $3,000 credit card at Dell for Christmas and he's going nuts to use it. I know you guys say Dell is crap but if he buys a Dell Studio XPS 9000 is he wasting his credit? If so, can Dell do a custom DAW for the money?

I'm running PT on my Dell XPS 420... it has given me trouble on and off for the past 2 years but for the most part, it works fine. The troubles were usually associated with me switching the OS or my Digi002 hardware failing. You should be fine with the Dell as long as you do a bit of research.

The best scenario though, would be to just build a PC rig from scratch. Maybe sell your $3000 Dell credit card some how and use that money for the rig.

This is the best thread on custom built rigs.

[albee1952]

A Dell with an i7 920 and an X58 chipset would probably be fine(you might need to add an approved firewire card). If you can verify those components, you might be in good shape. I would suggest buying 2 extra hard drives. 1 for audio as you need a separate drive anyway, and the other to replace the system drive. It would likely come loaded with Windows 7(maybe 64 bit) and lots of Dell Bloatware. I would remove the system drive, install a blank drive and buy/load Windows XP pro with SP3. Stash the original system drive for later use when Pro Tools has a bulletproof version to go with it. You might spend an afternoon on the internet updating drivers and such for the XP setup, but you stand a better chance of a trouble-free system. Just an opinion.

BTW, if you can spec parts, select a 256-512mb video card(avoid the 1gig cards).

[dave911]

Just read a post here last week someone was saying they had good luck with the Dell business line.
My experience with Dell is that they have good years and bad. For quite a while Dell consumer support was known as Dell Hell.
The preloaded bloat-ware is a pain and it takes a while clean it all out.
Since it can take a good bit of customizing to get PT to run well anyway I like being familar with all the hardware and having the manuals. Also I like to mess with computers, if you don't ....

[TOM@METRO]

Just keep in mind... No big PC maker is ever going to offer something even close to what you can build yourself. All that proprietary bloat ware must be overcome before you really even start.

[Shan]

Originally Posted by TOM@METRO

All that proprietary bloat ware must be overcome before you really even start.

..and that is the big downside to these off-the-shelf PC's. If one chooses that route(I dont recommend it myself), it would be best to wipe the drive and do a new fresh install of the OS or just create a new partition for a fresh OS install and dual boot. A clean slate start is best for PT.

Shane

[JoeyF]

Thanks guys for all the quick replys and your help. I can always depend on the DUC for great info. I think I'll just go with the kid's original desires, buy the Dell and clean out the bloat. I like to play with computers myself, even built a PC rig when I first opened this studio and it was a killer with PT. I think I'm just lazy and was hoping for Dell to be more audio friendly. Guess that will never happen. We've had such great soilid performance from the Mac's, I must have turned my brain off!