. I need to get one mainly for word processing and maybe even some power point stuff and for a sheet music program for a music theory class I'm in. IF I were to see about sticking Sonar in it and using it for recording or shooting little vids to put up on You Tube (I guess using Vegas).
Would I want to start off with a 7200 rpm hard drive ....
The most I'd record with the thing it two tracks (just stereo) live of real informal stuff. |
Okay, a couple of things..
you can buy a Dell on ebay or somesuch for almost nothing (under $600) that will do a certain amount of recording....easily 2 tracks, probably more than ten, but if you're adding video you have to figure that into the data flow, too. The internal drive will do fine, but they are usually smaller in these budget machines.
You could buy a more muscular machine, but that gets real expensive real fast. I bought a Dell for my girl last Christmas for under $600, and a laptop specifically for recording for well over $2000.
You could put a firewire hard drive in line.... I bought a pair of firewire drive enclosures that allow me to insert my own drives, so you can buy 400 gig under $100 Samson Spinpoint 7200 RPM drives and simply plug them in to the enclosure. Another answer would be to get a pull-out drive bay case, but really, four screws and a couple of connectors, not such a big deal for a personal setup.
Learning how to set up the laptop for recording will be more important at first.
No reason to worry, until you decide that you need to record a boatload of tracks at once, or you suddenly need to put massive amounts of processing on massive amounts of tracks... then NO computer is fast enough. Buy the inexpensive machine and be happy until you find limits, then upgrade when/as/if it becomes practical.
Bill