New laptop thoughts... Need something that can run music stuff

thecolourbox

My current laptop is driving me up the wall. It's an HP Pavilion with an i3 and 6gb of ram but since the forced so called "upgrade" to Windows 10 it's been terrible. I even installed an ssd to try to improve it and installed from scratch but still infuriating. 

I seem to have to do updates every time I log on and then loads of things don't work.

I've been trying to use Cubase and Reaper recently but it can't keep up, I plugged in the Line 6 Studio GX interface tonight to try to use Pod Farm through Reaper and the latency is horrible, like having only a slapback delay and no dry signal.

But laptops seem to have got a lot more expensive since I last looked (think I got this one in 2011 or 2012, can't remember) and specs seem much lower for the same price (I paid £400 for this one). 

So if I get one the same kind of money am I looking at the same crap performance? How high in price do I need to go for a system that works and allows me to play through plug ins, and to use Cubase Elements 8 without it freezing every time I change a drum kit?

Or will I have to consider a Mac? I had a Mac Mini which also needed upgrading every five minutes but I didn't use it often due to the monitor thing, I need a laptop. I suppose an Air is the kind of one I'd need to look at?

Thanks

Axe_meister

Have a look at Ryzen 3 2200U based laptops. You get 4 cores for the same price as an i3 based laptops.

thecolourbox

Axe_meister said:

Have a look at Ryzen 3 2200U based laptops. You get 4 cores for the same price as an i3 based laptops.

Somebody told me once that multiple cores are not as good as you just get multiple low speed processors instead - is that rubbish?

Legionreturns

FWIW I'm running a substantially lower spec machine than that with reaper and multiple plug ins, midi controller etc and have no performance issues at all. It could be a sound card / cpu problem.

thecolourbox

Legionreturns said:

FWIW I'm running a substantially lower spec machine than that with reaper and multiple plug ins, midi controller etc and have no performance issues at all. It could be a sound card / cpu problem.

I've no idea really, it takes about 5 minutes to start up, as it stays unusable on the desktop screen for ages and just generally very slow, has been since the w10 update and no better since I wiped the drives and installed from scratch, nor was it any better when I put the ssd in

Axe_meister

That is pretty rubbish these days, especially as AMD core as pretty much the same speed as Intel especially in the mobile market.
Also consider all the crap running in the background these days, better have that running on two core leaving two cores for you to do your work.

thecolourbox

Axe_meister said:

That is pretty rubbish these days, especially as AMD core as pretty much the same speed as Intel especially in the mobile market.
Also consider all the crap running in the background these days, better have that running on two core leaving two cores for you to do your work.

Be brilliant if this stuff could run on a hardware unit instead I suppose so we wouldn't need to piss about with all this malarkey

sinbaadi

Format and put Windows 7 back on.

fandango

You might need to spring for an i7 processor based laptop, such as a Dell XPS with either 13 or 15 screen. The maverick choice is a MacBook Pro - depending on whether you can get the software you want.

menamestom

Is it free of bloatware etc?

Worth running a utility like ‘Should I remove It’. (If you haven’t already).

http://www.shouldiremoveit.com/

But sounds more like a Windows issue so perhaps a clean install?

To be honest, my wife has a £400 hp and it’s been a similar story.  You have to force power it off and it randomly freezes, despite a fresh install and new ssd.  

crunchman

thecolourbox said:

Legionreturns said:

FWIW I'm running a substantially lower spec machine than that with reaper and multiple plug ins, midi controller etc and have no performance issues at all. It could be a sound card / cpu problem.

I've no idea really, it takes about 5 minutes to start up, as it stays unusable on the desktop screen for ages and just generally very slow, has been since the w10 update and no better since I wiped the drives and installed from scratch, nor was it any better when I put the ssd in

If it's taking 5 minutes to boot up from an SSD there is something wrong with it.  I had an old Dell Core 2 Duo that would boot into Win10 in around 30s (maybe less) when I put an SSD in it.

Have a look in Task Manager at all the processes, and see if there is something hogging all the processor/memory.

Danny1969

Some of the cheaper HP Pavilion are terrible from a design point of view, the AMD ones were (still are) the worse but the whole cheaper end of the range is prone to problems and running like a sick dog after a while is one of them. That shop I do repairs for is constantly getting them in for OS rebuilds and sometimes it makes little difference ..

As @Legionreturns said it's not the spec of your laptop,  I don't have any problems running Reaper on my laptop which is a 5 year old Dell Latitude with 3Gb of ram. I think your problem is more hardware. 

There's a couple of things you can try, is it any better with the battery removed and running off just the charger ? I ask because there's a little chip on the board that handles all the power and battery management ... it talks to the EPROM in the battery and comm failure here will make the machine laggy as hell as it's a priority thread and will be worse under Win 10 as the power management is more advanced than 7 

Is the charger OK .... I know it runs the laptop but that only means the 19V and ground is present. There's a tiny centre pin in the centre of the charger end which is the comm pin for the charger \ maxim chip \ battery ... a failure here means the laptop will run off the charger but won't charge properly and performance will be degraded under certain conditions. 

My own view on buying laptops is don't buy them on specifications ... don't assume you can tell the speed of a laptop or how good a laptop will be for audio from the processor \ ram etc .... the actual quality of the design makes more of a difference once the device is in use and things are getting hot and the power in terms of current is needed all around the board at once. Years ago I took a video showing a 266Mhz PII IBM Thinkpad outperform a Novatech 400Mhz P11 in Photoshop and Cakewalk to show a customer it's not all about the spec on paper

I can't recommend any Windows laptop you can buy new cheaply because these days they are all terrible unless you move up to the business \ corporate machines. The Macbook Pro's are very nice but very expensive. I tend to just buy ex lease corporate machines myself. The old Dell I'm typing this on runs Win 10 \ Reaper and everything I want to do perfectly and cost £150 from Ebay 

ThePrettyDamned

Danny1969 said:

Some of the cheaper HP Pavilion are terrible from a design point of view, the AMD ones were (still are) the worse but the whole cheaper end of the range is prone to problems and running like a sick dog after a while is one of them. That shop I do repairs for is constantly getting them in for OS rebuilds and sometimes it makes little difference ..

As @Legionreturns said it's not the spec of your laptop,  I don't have any problems running Reaper on my laptop which is a 5 year old Dell Latitude with 3Gb of ram. I think your problem is more hardware. 

There's a couple of things you can try, is it any better with the battery removed and running off just the charger ? I ask because there's a little chip on the board that handles all the power and battery management ... it talks to the EPROM in the battery and comm failure here will make the machine laggy as hell as it's a priority thread and will be worse under Win 10 as the power management is more advanced than 7 

Is the charger OK .... I know it runs the laptop but that only means the 19V and ground is present. There's a tiny centre pin in the centre of the charger end which is the comm pin for the charger \ maxim chip \ battery ... a failure here means the laptop will run off the charger but won't charge properly and performance will be degraded under certain conditions. 

My own view on buying laptops is don't buy them on specifications ... don't assume you can tell the speed of a laptop or how good a laptop will be for audio from the processor \ ram etc .... the actual quality of the design makes more of a difference once the device is in use and things are getting hot and the power in terms of current is needed all around the board at once. Years ago I took a video showing a 266Mhz PII IBM Thinkpad outperform a Novatech 400Mhz P11 in Photoshop and Cakewalk to show a customer it's not all about the spec on paper

I can't recommend any Windows laptop you can buy new cheaply because these days they are all terrible unless you move up to the business \ corporate machines. The Macbook Pro's are very nice but very expensive. I tend to just buy ex lease corporate machines myself. The old Dell I'm typing this on runs Win 10 \ Reaper and everything I want to do perfectly and cost £150 from Ebay 

My eyes have been opened by the YouTube channel, "official budget builds", where he has built pcs from scrap that are faster than some new laptops I've used  

He suggests a few key things:

-pc is clean
-cooler attached properly and with good thermal paste that has not dried up 
- fully functioning hard drive 
- good quality ram 
- overall good air flow to help regulate temperature 

He mostly does desktop builds but I'd imagine this wisdom carries over, along with your info on batteries/chargers.

shrinkwrap

I run Reaper on a vintage Q6600 desktop with 4MB ram and Vista - no problems whatsoever.
That machine also boots MUCH faster than my Win7 and i7 chip PC - god knows how they manage to make it worse each time.
Linux next time I think.

Definitely something wrong with that laptop and probably not too hard to figure out what!

dano

Danny1969 said:

 I tend to just buy ex lease corporate machines myself. The old Dell I'm typing this on runs Win 10 \ Reaper and everything I want to do perfectly and cost £150 from Ebay 

@Danny1969 is there any ebay stores you can recommend ? I could do with a newish laptop soon.

Jez6345789

Hi 
A Mac is a good place to go in my opinion but look at Mac pro, not mac air. 

Also, I got a new one last month in John Lewis on interest-free so as its hard to get discount on Apple stuff unless you are really in the know when it makes sense. 

If you don't have to go laptop then I just bought a refurbed Dell quad-core small footprint tower off amazon for like 229 with SSD etc. Ist for the warehouse to print off orders and process stuff through but frankly cheap as chips and is running windows 10 fine

. 

Danny1969

dano said:

Danny1969 said:

 I tend to just buy ex lease corporate machines myself. The old Dell I'm typing this on runs Win 10 \ Reaper and everything I want to do perfectly and cost £150 from Ebay 

@Danny1969 is there any ebay stores you can recommend ? I could do with a newish laptop soon.

Mine came from RD-UK mate but there's quite a few dealers selling ex corp laptops on Ebay with one years warranty 

m_c

Up until last year, I was still using my Dell Inspiron 1545 that I bought new in 2009, and it handled most things I threw at it, despite only being an Intel Duo 2 core processor with 4GB. Although it did have a proper dedicated graphics chip and memory.
It did get an upgrade to Win 7 from Vista, and an SSD upgrade a few years ago. The SSD made a huge difference. It went from taking a couple minutes to fully boot, to around 30 seconds. And it could still handle running Fusion360 (CAD/CAM software), and Ableton. It could even manage video editing without too much lag.

It did struggle a bit at timing events though when it was acting as the database server to 3 other laptops running result screens, especially when I had to number crunch all the results near the end of events.

It finally died with a screen of psychedelic colours last year, so I bit the bullet and bought a custom built laptop from PC Specialists. i7, 16GB, SSD, 4GB dedicated graphics. I've yet to find something that makes it noticeable falter :-/

menamestom

thecolourbox said:

 I suppose an Air is the kind of one I'd need to look at?

Thanks

Air’s are a bit out of date nowadays, for the price.  However they may get updated in the next few months or reduced in price quite a bit.  If you are looking at new Air’s probably worth waiting until the end of June.   I’d consider one if they updated the screen to Retina and gave the processors a decent bump (to Kaby Lake at least).   Saying that I’ll most likely get a pro, 13 inch 256gb ssd.

darthed1981

thecolourbox said:

Legionreturns said:

FWIW I'm running a substantially lower spec machine than that with reaper and multiple plug ins, midi controller etc and have no performance issues at all. It could be a sound card / cpu problem.

I've no idea really, it takes about 5 minutes to start up, as it stays unusable on the desktop screen for ages and just generally very slow, has been since the w10 update and no better since I wiped the drives and installed from scratch, nor was it any better when I put the ssd in

FWIW - @thecolourbox ;I believe you have not got a fundamental performance problem but more likely something driver or config related.  As legionreturns said, your spec should still mean a speedy machine, mine is just an old core i3 2125 with 8GB RAM, and it still goes just fine.

Taking 5 minutes to boot up is the most interesting one, as normally Win 10 doesn't even properly shut down but uses something called "fast boot" to start up quicker, so the first thing I'd do is turn off quick boot (or turn it on if it is off) and see if it makes a difference https://lifehacker.com/enable-this-setting-to-make-windows-10-boot-up-faster-1743697169

The other thing to try is going into device manager and checking for all the latest drivers.  Win 10 sometimes doesn't pick up all the latest ones that are available by this means, and I've found it downloads graphics drivers, and even ones for obscure things like ACPI that could make a difference in your case.

Look at task manager and the tab labelled "startup" and see what is running, is there anything you don't need?  Then disable it and this might help.

Another issue I've found with Lenovo laptops upgraded from Win7 at work (not sure if it also applies ot HP but something similar might), is that they had a bit of Lenovo software installed and it was trying to run scheduled tasks all over the shop, which made the system take longer to boot and be generally sluggish.  The Win 10 upgrade I believe removed the software that tried to manage your system, but did not remove the scheduled tasks!

How did you do your fresh install?  With a USB made with the creation toolkit?  For sure the best way.

The other thing I'd say is, don't hold off on the updates, Windows 10 is obsessed with updating itself and seems to randomly turn things off if you don't.  I'm now running a preview of the new 1803 version (due next month on Windows update) and it's just fine, but at work I've noticed that anniversary update aside, which introduced some small issues, generally Win10 gets better with each update.  Which version of Windows 10 are you currently running?

m_c

darthed1981 said:

The other thing to try is going into device manager and checking for all the latest drivers.  Win 10 sometimes doesn't pick up all the latest ones that are available by this means, and I've found it downloads graphics drivers, and even ones for obscure things like ACPI that could make a difference in your case.

This is actually a valid point.
I had issues with my graphics drivers crashing after the last major windows update. Turned out Intel don't release all their drivers through the windows update system, but they do however provide an updater tool, that scans your system for any intel hardware, and checks for updates. There were quite a few drivers with updates, and I've not had any problems since.

I've just checked an HP have a support assistant which should do a similar thing - https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/