What do I give up going laptop vs desktop?

[rcook349]

Sorry to have to re-phrase an earlier question/post.

I'm wanting to go laptop for my next PT workstation, but wonder what and how much I'd be giving up.. in terms of performance and whatever else.

To date, I've had a laptop for all my work and other stuff in life, and then also a dedicated desktop just for audio and video production work.

Is it realistic to think I could drop the desktop? Can I do everything on the laptop just as effectively? I would think I'd be giving up something.. even if a high-end laptop.

Thanks for any comments.

Ron Cook
Boulder, CO

[froyo]

In my experience, if you go with at least a Centrino 1.5 Ghz or AMD 64 laptop, 1 Ghz of memory AND a 7200 rpm internal laptop drive, about the only thing you will lose is PCI slots. So that may be an issue for you.

But in my experience, even if your internal laptop drive is only 5400 rpm you can still get outsanding performance anyway. But the 7200 rpm drive will help a little more. You will still use other drives for audio, but the 7200 rpm internal will help make things smoother.

Basically, from where I stand, the only thing you lose is PCI slots.

[crs117]

Lets see...

First of all you lose an incredibly loud processor fan and psu fan which can interfere with recording and monitering. You miss out on having to lug 2 huge computer components (moniter and case) to live gigs for recording. You lose the inconvienence of not having your computer where you need it when you want it...Lets see none of these are bad at all.

Seriously though...

You miss out on having more then one hard drive internally installed. An oxford 911 firewire enclosure and a good firewire card should remedy this. You miss out on having multple optical drives in one computer. But the biggest thing you will miss out on (if this is your thing) is being able to play the latest games with the best graphics because desktop graphics cards are still quite a bit more advanced then laptop chips.

Christian

[Gunnar Hellquist]

Performance vise a modern laptop will probably be good enough for most works. Of course there is always a limit, but most probably your new laptop will anyway be better than your old desktop in that respect.

Of course you will be a bit more limited in what hardware you can use, no PCI slots for example. But if you go with an MBOX or 002 that as such is not a limiting factor.

One of the things that can be frustration though is the lack of a real numeric keypad on most laptops. Most of the really useful keyboard shortcust in PT are on the keypad, as I have found out. It is not impossible to work without one, and if necessare the cost of an external keyboard is not much to talk about. External keypads via USB or so, has their own problems and may not work as expected in this usage. And, depending on your eysight, the resolution and size of the internal screen can be a bit on the small side.

For important work, it pays off to turn off networking and screen savers and such. If the machine ever goes on the internet, use firewall and anti-virus software.

The thing you really miss out on if you ask me is reliability. My daytime job is as controller in a fairly large IT organization, and the real IT guys tell me that although it has changed to the better, the laptops has a much higher rate of problems. So get a really good disk backup solution, preferrably two firewire disks -- one on even dates and another on odd dates. Run backups often and have at least two "generations" of backups.

I tend to partition my disk into three partitions -- OS and programs on one, data and samples on another, and the current audio projects (one or a few depending on size) in an otherwise empty partition. As the OS and program part is not really changed so often, it is not necessary to backup that every day. Instead I might want to have a few generations of that to go back to, perhaps with and without the latest version of some program until I am certain it is stable.

Data (eg, documents and such) and audio is backed up every day changes has been done. When I work on several audio projects at the same time, I have them each in their own directory, where the whole directory goes in and out of the laptop disk if the storage gets limited. It pays off to get good routines in this area, but I guess you already know that.

[albee1952]

Oh people, some of you that are partitioning a drive so you have a "seperate" audio drive are missing the point. The idea is so that the drive heads(that do all the "work" can concentrate on audio and ignore all of the system needs. The operating system has enough work for the heads to accomplish without chasing your 32 tracks of digital audio. I realize that it does work to some degree, but a seperate drive(a REALLY seperate drive) is much better and will allow you to tap the potentioal of whatever your cpu can deliver. Besides, your audio really should be done on a 7200rpm drive as per Digi's requirements. Consider this as it relates to speed. I have the same antivirus program on my desktop and laptop. The desktop 7200rpm drive will finish a scan in under an hour, while the 5400rpm laptop drive takes over 2 hours (both are 40gig drives). If you insist on using the slow internal drive on your laptop, its probably a waste of time to create partitions at all. If you disagree, please add your thoughts as I don't claim to be the last word on this or anything else.