Recommended laptop PC's for live performance

What are some recommended laptop PC's for live performance that are known to work well with Traktor?

Have any other advice for getting a laptop?

 

Macbook / Macbook Pro =)

 

Yeah, Macbooks are great, especially when the bluetooth and airport drivers cause traktor to skip in OS X! If you have a problem within boot camp, the native instruments support team won't even try to help you. I've tried.

What are some recommended laptop PC's to run windows XP?

 

I'm not trying to be a smartass here, but in a live gig situation, you really don't want bluetooth or network stuff switched on.

Disable everything you don't need ( not much on a mac, probably just bluetooth & airport), set your power management up for best performance, switch off dashboard, screen savers & any other uneccessary eye candy. Then you'll be fine.

Check my signature. ....no macbook problems here!

 

Thanks for the tips imianwilliams. The main reason I'm looking for a PC is because I love FL Studio and it doesn't run well with boot camp because when there are any problems, the people I am getting tech support from just blame it on boot camp. They say they don't support it and so they won't help me.

 

I've had good luck with my HP Pavillion DV8120CA, but I will be upgrading to a Dell M1730 in the near future.

 

any laptop pc with some decent specs should work fine.
By decent specs i don't just mean greater than the recommended requirements of traktor in the cpu/ram department.
I mean, dedicated video ram, decent mainboard chipset etc.

e.g. I have an Asus F3SC, this has a 2GHz core2duo, 2GB Ram, nVidia 8400M graphics with 128MB of dedicated video ram and the mainboard chipset is intels 965 express. It came with Windows Vista installed and on top of nvidias stupid turbo cache system ram allocation a fresh boot gave me about 600MB of ram free.
I formatted it to a nice clean XP install and was left with ~1.8GB of ram at my disposal.

By comparison a cheaper laptop would have an intel 945 chipset or worse with intel X3100 integrated graphics, stealing 128MB of system memory and slowing down the memory that was left for windows/traktor. While this is still sufficient, it's not awesome and the difference it boiled down to for me was around $300 - and the cheaper option had 1GB of ram not 2.

With this setup i can keep key lock on constantly and run maximum time stretch quality and deck caching in traktor and have plenty of cpu/ram headroom.

It's up to you what brands you prefer (based on your experience or others) or what is more available. I happen to work at a computer store and we stock mainly Asus, I purchased this particular model knowing there are XP drivers for every single component.
The above mentioned Dell M1530/1730 range would definitely be suited - even more so if you have the option of ordering it with windows XP. Vista is a waste of time and microsoft has basically acknowledged this themselves by pushing forward the next version of windows release date to 2009.

 

@ Wuz

Yep, you can order the XPS line with Windows XP

Thank GOODNESS!

 

I've got a MacBook now, but used an Acer Travelmate for 18 months without a single crash. For £380 you can't argue with that.

 

i'm happy with my laptop (see signature).

afer 1.5 years still the preinstalled OS on it, barely tweaked.
running TS/T33 combo with lowest settings and recording mixes in cubase running on the same machine.

i really cant complain!

but it's up to your likings what computer you like to choose.
traktor users on mac vs pc is 50:50.

 

Dell XPS M1710 - beast - love it. No problems - ever.

 

The only problem with Dell laptops seems to be playing tunes from an audio CD in the CD Drive - I've only ever tried it in Latitudes but all 5 I've used have had a problem.
Given that most people rarely (if ever) want that function it probably doesn't matter much.

 

I'll add that if you're against buying a laptop online and want to buy one from a store (instant gratification or whatever reason), the Inspiron 1525 from Best Buy (which comes with Vista) can be made into an XP box very easily and is a solid performer. If you're looking to "downgrade" a laptop of ANY kind, make sure that you research beforehand and verify that ALL drivers needed are available in XP.

A good example of this is GPU drivers. Lots of the newer laptops are shipping with the new nVidia 8800M series of graphics processors. These currently do not have XP drivers available from the nVidia website. And most OEM drivers check against vendor ID before they install, so installing one from another company will result in failure. You either have to hack the driver yourself, or wait for someone else to do it.

 

one word - ASUS - the most bang for your buck and a solid machine. This is the notebook that programmers and computer geeks (mean that in a nice way) buy.

second info - shop at newegg.com -- best prices.....

I don't work for either of these companies....and I should state that I own both a Macbook Pro and an Asus PC notebook....nothing better than one of each, Mac and PC.

I personally would prefer Mac's, but there are some programs that you can't run natively and personally I don't want to use boot camp.

 

One of the reason I like traktor is that it doesn't take to much to get it to go. I have a Dell Latitude 110L and its out dated by a few years... I have never had one problem with running traktor.

 

My current laptop

Hi All,

Thankfully found this forum and hoping someone can help. I'm a complete beginner to Traktor. I just yesterday received my Vestax VCI-100 with Traktor 3 LE.

I upgraded to the latest Traktor 3 LE, and yes, I know I should by full Traktor at some point.

My problem is I'm getting a nasty digital distortion noise when I do some things like move the crossfader quickly, or load a song to the other deck etc. I'm scared to gig with this setup. Can anybody recommend what is wrong in my system that would be causing this? My laptop far exceeds the minimum requirements, and I did all the computer optimization recommendations in the manual. Does changing the sample size help? Not really sure what that means. Thanks!

Controller: Vestax VCI-100
Software: Traktor 3.3 LE
Sound Card: Echo Indigo DJ
Laptop: Dell (Don't know model number) Pentium M 1.6 GHZ 1 GB Ram
Hard Drive: Western Digital MyBook USB 2.0 500GB

 

Im not sure, but it maybe a latency problem.

 

I have the same problem. By the way what what otimisation manual are you talking about? I am hearing things that people say you need to do ''all audio optimizations such as Wlan off, antivir off, firewall off,... latest driver and such like but cannot find a forum post that list them all? DO you know where I can find one? Let me know how and if you solve your current issues.

 

chapter 12 i your LE manual.

 

my laptop only cost £299 with £65 upgrade for memory. You dont need to spend big bucks as all you are buying are hardware and software features that you are not going to use. I've almost got mine working now. Its all about shutting everything down that runs in the background. The support instructions on here are quite good but there are a few mistakes and omissions I found with them.