Recommended laptop

thanx guys

 

@ toxic nihilist - In case you were planning or are taking dell laptops into consideration for your new purchase....make sure not to buy any latops from the Dell Studio Line, as those seem to have severe problems with running Traktor Scratch smoothly because of their bios! for more infos on that subject, check this thread:

http://www.native-instruments.com/forum/showthread.php?t=82401&highlight=Dell+studio

There are several more threads about the problems with dell laptops on this Forum, but form what I know, the Inspirion- as well as most of the XPS-Line seem to work fine...I myself am using a Dell XPS-420 as my Studio-Desktop and it works fine with TSD.
Greetz
Strategy

 

I got into this biz doing it as a hobby and now I'm doing it full time and making a career out of it so I guess I chose well using a Mac.

I'm in the process of setting up a dedicated Mac for doing gigs. To me, the simplicity and lack of complexity makes the price differential well worth it. In my area wedding DJ's get between $160-$200.00 USD per hour. I'd rather spend my time getting that next gig than having to worry about how well my OS is going to perform or worry about BIOS. In fact, my Mac has allowed me to forget what BIOS is.

I heard someone in this thread say that "all software crashes." Traktor may crash on me one day but it hasn't yet. My OS has not crashed on me in over 3.5 years.

I've never had malware or virus related issues, either. This gives me great peace of mind when, after having used my laptop for business all week, I can do a gig with that same laptop and know that it'll all be ok.

Based on my experience with the Mac I'd suggest that route. I look at the time I spend learning software like Traktor as a good investment that makes me a better DJ while I look at time spent playing with BIOS/registry/etc as time invested making me a better computer support technician. The headache free route usually points to the Mac. Yes, the upfront price is more, but down the road the supports costs of a Mac will be so much less that it does wind up being cheaper.

Keep in mind that I'm DJ'ing for business reasons and as a career. I tend to look at business equipment purchases differently than those for fun/hobbies.

Best,

Russ

PS: Writing this on a 3.5 year old MacBook Pro which was just upgraded to the most recent Mac OS yesterday with no additional hardware needed.

 

I would have to agree with Dj Strategy, the Dell Studio line does seem to have some problems with TSP. I am running the Dell XPS 1640 laptop, with no problems. Check the dell outlet, got mine for $900 USD with 2 day express shipping.

 

thanx for th einfo but you miss understood me i have just brought a sony vaio and im well pleased with it.

ive read the peace on customizing the laptp but to be honest traktor only uses 10 percent cpu so i cant be arsed

 

Being the type that likes to live dangerously, I conducted a little experiment just before my gig last Saturday. I switched off all the "make Windows look nice" stuff, disabled the DVD-ROM, ethernet and wireless doobries, and killed a few background applications like antivirus and spybot, etc.
By doing this I managed to go from 3.5ms to 1.5ms latency with no audio glitches. The was no chage in reliability because I have yet to experience any problems runnning Traktor anyway. Not bad for a 380 quid laptop from Currys

I think the real trick is to keep your lappy clean and don't fill it full of google taskbars and pr0n.

Specs: Acer with Core2 2Ghz CPU, 4 Gb RAM and a 5400rpm 160 Gb HDD.

 

Congrats and enjoy!...yeah I feel the same....I read thru several forums bevor purchasing my new laptop and was told over and over again, if I wanted a Laptop for traktor running windows I should go with Sony....and till now my laptop has never let me down!