Laptops

I have an Apple G4 which I got because I wanted to learn more about OSX and so on, but now I am used too it I think it might be a good idea to move to a PC laptop. It seems to me there are more, and better audio programs for the PC which is what I want to use it for mainly.

My main issue with PC laptops though is the noise! The G4 iBooks make no noise except when they are getting very hot and then a single fan turns on. Most laptops I have seen have fans going all the time and sometimes more than one.

What QUIET PC laptops are there?

 

I have a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo M which is silent 90% of the time. As it has the Pentium M processor, if you aren't doing anything processor intensive it lowers the power output and switches off the fan, load up a large program (Football Manager, Vice City, San Andreas etc.) and the CPU increases its speed and brings the fan on.

 

What type of audio apps are you thinking of? The best music / audio / MIDI tool currently available IMHO is Logic and it is Mac only. The Mac is (and has been from year dot) the pro-audio computer platform of choice - Cubase, Pro Tools and Logic have always run much better and more reliably on Macs than PCs.

Tony.

 

Well I was wanting something like ETF or CoolEdit. The closest I know of for the Mac is Audacity, and to be honest it seems crap ( I don't think it likes my external soundcard much either). I prefer Cubase to Logic, and I have a Mac version of SX 3 but it isn't a replacement for CoolEdit or ETF.

My brother got an IBM ThinkPad recently which was a Centrino Pentium M thing and that had a pretty noisy fan I thought.

 

I used to use Sound Forge on PC and have found Audacity a little counterintuitive in comparison, but it's hard to knock it given it is completely missing a price tag. It seems to have most if not all features I'd ever need and seems to work fine with my Tascam US-122 midi / audio box.

I used Cubase for many years on an Atari ST and found it solid and remarkably reliable. Since then I have tried numerous versions on PCs over the years and found it to be a steaming heap of crap – when it didn't actually BSOD the OS it would crash itself out or run with such laughable latency so as to be totally unusable. On my last PC, a Toshiba Tecra 9100 with a 1.7 P4 and half a Gb of Ram the MIDI latency was so bad it was utterly useless in any musical context. I've never seen Cubase not work perfectly on a Mac, I've also never been in a studio that used a PC for running the MIDI / Audio kit… I suspect there is a reason for this!

Tony.

 

iTony,
The reason for this is that Macs are what most studios are used to using (and there is an awful lot going for the if it ain't broke approach). However, audacity (painfully slow IME on PC), Pro Tools and pretty much everything else is available for PC nowadays, which probably also says something

 

the trick with laptops is to get one with a processor, hdd and video card that are laptop specific that way they'll have adequate cooling without the noise. some manufacturers use desktop/tower rated components to increase speed / decrease price and then have to add ruddy great fans in order to cool them sufficiantly. my rock direct pegasus dts pro is damn near silent and i use it for very intensive video / physics stuff which give the procesor / graphics a good work out with minimum fan / hdd noise.

 

I'd second Julian's comments. There are lots of P4 based laptops which havent mastered the art of cooling so dont assume the average budget laptop (most likely a Pentium 4 rather than Pentium 4 M based macine) will have been really tested and troubleshooted.

In terms of Centrino / Pentium M machines (as far as I know the Centrino branding only applies to machines with a Pentium M CPU AND an Intel WiFi device) my T43 is quiet most of the time but intermittently is a little noisier than I would like for an audio machine.

To be honest every PC laptop I've personally considered (by no means an exhaustive list) have one drawback or another. You might be best looking at audio specific machines though there will be a price overhead.

HTH
G

 

My ThinkPad blows at full speed during startup and that is quite noisy. Once it is running Windows, it is silent until you start working, and then it blows quietly. Even on a hot day I've never managed to get it to blow anything other than quietly.

A laptop processor sufficiently cool to not need the fan is also not likely to have sufficient power for your music apps. Somthing like a 2GHz Pentium M is about the best compromise you'll get. Avoid Pentium 4 if you want a quiet life. A 3GHz Pentium 4 isn't really any quicker than a 2GHz Pentium M anyway.

 

My theory as to why PCs don't work with MIDI is that Mac OS9 was utterly crap at multitasking, therefore the foreground app got virtually all of the CPU time. At the time (early Pentium days) Windows multitasking ensured that the foreground app never got anything other than time slicing (even if no other apps were open), and as a result absolutely unusable MIDI latency. I don't know if you have ever run Cubase on a PC, but hit a note on the MIDI keyboard and the sound can emerge anything up to half a second later from either the virtual synth or MIDI out port! Useless.

I've never tried a really high spec PC with a firewire MIDI bus, but every PC I've tried has been infinitely worse than a mid 80s Atari with regards to latency. I've never heard any latency whatsoever from a G3 or G4 Mac and I've seen some remarkably complex studio installations fronted by some pretty low spec Macs. I've also met a couple studio engineers who tried PCs and concluded they were unsuitable for the role. I'm not a Mac evangelist, if the question was to find either a gaming or corporate program development platform I'd recommend PC every time, it is just they are honestly crap for pro-audio.

Tony.

 

That's a good point, the 2Ghz Pentium M with 2MB of level 2 cache is pretty much as quick as a 3.0 P4 AFAIK.

 

I managed to get my laptop to run quieter by recording to an external hdd