apogee

Hey, I'm in the market for a new notebook, and I'm all about a good deal. Trouble is, I don't know what exactly I'm looking for.. Basically, I'm just a huge music nut, and I want something incredibly fast to run my music programs, besides a huge HD to store all my flacs and whatnot. Well, here are my criteria
- MUST run Reason and work well with MIDI-out (usb or firewire)
- Large, fast hard drive.
- A great dvd-cd burner.
- Built to last
- I hate Windows Vista.
- budget of $2500 or less. I'd like to just get something great and use it for a long time.

Now.... here's another kicker. I've always seen musicians use macbooks for their programs. Do they work better with Midi and audio software? Also, I do some painter 8 and illustrator and so forth with my wacom tablet. Is Mac really worth the price difference there? I'm not a gamer per se, but it's always nice to have the option... though I hear that macs can run windows anyway. Ideally, I'd just like a windows XP notebook with a blazing fast duo processor, Ram, gfx and audio cards, other criteria met.. but if macs are really better for music and art programs, I'll certainly go that route. As for the hard drive, I'll go external if it's better, but my current 250gb simpledrive kicks out for no reason (overheat?) whenever I try to transfer large amounts of files.

My last note - the only thing I've really been looking at so far are Toshiba Satellites and Higher end macbooks. Please, help me out - I know I'm kind of all over the place, but I've posted in other forums and they were pretty much useless.

Thanks!

apogee

Did I put this in the wrong forum or something...? -or do you not do recommendations...

TheMatt

Hi Dingo, and welcome to TSF!

If you don't need dedicated graphics, then you can get a very fast laptop easily for under $1500. Anything more expensive than that will be with dedicated graphics. Take a look at this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834146230

The high resolution screen is good for having a large area to edit wave files and such. I am not sure if this laptop has S/PDIF audio out, but you can always get an external sound card from creative. The onboard is pretty good though.

With Macs, the problem lies in the fact that you will have a limited availability of software. You can always ask over in the Mac forum if there are any good wave editors. You can always run Windows on a Mac, though, so you are not completely stuck. Mac laptops have good hardware and relatively better prices then their desktop versions, so without the limitation of software, a Mac would be a good choice.