Your opinion: macbook pro vs dell XPS for traktor pro

E6400
The only prob I have now is:
How to respond to silly music wishes like "Could you play this CD (with shitty mainstream music) for my boyfriend?"

 

Those are used in the HP laptops as well.

Talking about that I just had a scare. My laptop didn't want to boot windows.

Hard drives passed the diag tests, it would post and go to a black screen.

I tried for almost an hour, the XP install CD would stall at Starting Windows....

So I pulled the battery and the hardrive bay cover. I started up the laptop again and had it on it's back and then it booted.

WTH?

I'm backing up EVERYTHING as we speak.

 

I have the 1530 XPS, plays Traktor Pro FINE! Better then V3 I'd say.

 

check the dell outlet wharehouse for a better price

 

WOOOOO, just picked up the Dell ten minutes ago from the Purolator depot.

Sexy ass beast...

Here goes.....

 

Good luck with it mate...

I bought a Studio 15 last August, and it was nothing but trouble. There were real problems with the audio, which Dell eventually admitted was due to the wirelss card interfering with the sound and causing crackles/pops. It took me about 6 weeks, and 8 or 9 phone calls to Dell "support" (call centre in India, really NO fun at all) to finally get a refund. They were an absolute disgrace, and continually refused to admit anything was wrong with the crackling laptop.

The only reason I eventually got a refund was after agreeing to let them send out an engineer to replace the wireless card. The engineer was 3rd party, not working direct for Dell, and so he was happy to admit that the audio was awful and report it that way to Dell, because he wasn't going to get in trouble with his boss for admitting that the laptop didn't work properly.

It was a design flaw, not a fault. That's why replacing the card did nothing at all. I really got the impression that it was a known issue, and that the Dell staff had been told to try and avoid returns, as it would cost the company too much. Dell totally refused to admit that until the engineer himself agreed with me, and they could not dispute his professional opinion. He even deliberately made the call in front of me, on his mobile, so that Dell could not tell me later that he had said it was okay. He said this was not the first time he has had to do that with a Studio machine...

I will NEVER buy another Dell as long as I live. Their machine was badly designed and had serious audio problems. A google search soon showed me that it was a common issue. Dell continually ignored me and refused to accept that there was any problem. It was incredibly stressful, and has put me off Dell for life.

Best of luck with your machine, and I genuinely do hope that it works okay. However, if you do have the same problems I did, and Dell are refusing to accept it, drop me a line and I'll give you my full name so you can tell them of my case and demand that they treat you the same as their other customers, and refund your cash. It WILL literally take something like that to get them to agree to a refund. Common sense and decency means nothing to Dell now. Their attitude disgusted me, and I have been totally put off ever using them again.
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Oh, and as for the "Once you go mac you won't go back" fable, get over yourself! ;-p

I got myself a shiny macbook pro (early 2008) to replace the Dell, and within a week there were dark bands down the screen and the lid had started warping and lifting up at the sides. Google reported that it is a common issue with Macbook pro (15") and that Apple DO NOT honour their warranty, claiming that it is a cosmetic defect only. Yep, the fact that the laptop arrived fine, and then already started bending itself out of shape within a week! I reported it to the reseller I had bought it from, and they said that Apple's reponse to them was that this is a deliberate design feature. The lid is deliberately warped (no, really!) to avoid the screen touching the keys. Makes sense, until you remember that the lid arrived 100% FLAT, and started to warp over time, getting worse. Hence, if it was a deliberate design , why the h*ll didn't it arrive warped already in the box? And (here's the biggie) this warping issue does not happen to the 13" macbooks. They also have a screen, but do Apple not want to warp that lid too, to avoid keys touching it?

In a nutshell, Apple were lying to pretend that the fault was just part of the laptop, and refusing to honour their (expensive) warranty.

I went Mac, and I VERY definitely am going back!

 

Unfortunately Rich your cases are the exception, not the norm.

I hate hearing about bad experiences with any company I always have [false] hope that companies care enough about their customers to make changes and please them, but that's hardly the case it seems.

 

Ok I got everything ghosted over from my HP laptop and it's running XP like a BEAST!

Just going to grab some minor drivers now.

 

So far so good, all devices working and only one unknown device listed in the device manager which I will iron out later.

Pro running like a champ so far.

Everything is SAFE, loving the decision. Studio 17 is serious piece of gear.

THUMBS UP Dell!

I like you have a customer for life... Support was friendly and knowledgeable, Sales person added the options I needed quickly and correctly, it was built in one day and shipped out the following day PLUS arrived one day early.

Now that's SERVICE.

HP was rude to me on the phone when I tried to inquire about a new laptop since I was so happy with the dv8120ca I bought three years ago. They transferred me 6 six times and still couldn't help me.

I waited three months and called a week before I decided completely to go with Dell to give them a second chance.

This time the tech was knowledgeable and was completely honest. He's like go with Dell for what you need man. You know your sh** and at best we will have to custom build on the business side which probably even meet everything you have with the studio 17.

I'm like cool, thanks for being honest and sorry I couldn't keep my business with HP. I explained everything to him about Traktor and what I do and he happened to be a musician as well and is checking out a few of the NI production tools.

The tech at Dell was also super interested in NI, so I gave him all the info and he's checking it out. I expressed to him I wanted to build a relationship with ONE company who has good laptops and innovative ideas so we can eventually build a DJ inspired laptop that fits all the needs of DVS, etc.

So in a nutshell, it sounds like a good relationship from the get go with Dell.

If anyone grabs a studio 17 and needs help downgrading to XP, I can give you full instructions and a driver pack to do it.

This concludes my geek out session and now it's time to cut it up and go be social.

PEACE!

 

Hey DJ Q

Hows the latency on your studio17?

I bought a Studio15 and have got it dual booting with XP.

Have latency spikes up to 4000us on both vista and XP vanilla builds.

Not sure weather theyd ben able to run scratch or SSL with latency spikes like that.

 

I'm just doing cleaning the leftover HP stuff on the XP build and then I will make a ghost image of my build and store it on my backup external drive.

See what I did is ghosted the XP build from my HP Pavillion to an image file.

I wiped drive C: on the studio17 one time, copied the ghost image over to my second hardrive and then ghosted it back to drive C:

Then I booted up XP in safemode on the Dell and uninstalled all the HP apps and drivers.

In the meantime I made Dell Studio 1735/1737 driver CD, copied them onto the C: drive and detected all the Dell hardware.

Currently I have a 2000us spike every 4us that I'm trying to clean up, so it's not as bad as your issue.

It's not affecting TS Pro horribly but I do hear a little artifacting every so often while I was testing.

I'm still running 48khz @ 2ms and increasing latency would probably make the problem transparent.

I'm just doing some research, one user has raised the problem with Dell for the 1535 series and they are analyzing the issue.

I'm going to give Dell support a call if I can't clean it up the spikes and get a support case started.

I will keep everyone posted.

I updated to the A05 bios revision yesterday and it didn't clean up the spikes.

I'm going to talk with NI as well to see if there is something they can do with the Audio 8 driver and TS Pro to make it more resistant to DPC issues especially when they are small spikes.

It's a solvable problem, I had the same issue with TS1 on my HP laptop when I first switched over from my Shuttle XPC and it just took a couple driver updates to solve the problem.

 

I am looking into the Dell Studio XPS series myself. I will only have TPro installed, and I do not see any reason to change from Vista back to XP on this machine. Especially if it is only running TPro.....

Thanks for all the info Quartz, everything still going smooth?

 

Things are nice, just the minor spike issue I'm working on that I'm not too too worried about.

See the reason I migrated was I was switching my whole life basically plus all my applications.

And it was more timely to ghost the whole system state over from the HP laptop to the Dell and redetect everything.

I have to say XP SP3 is pretty much bulletproof, I remember a time where attempting this would have failed miserably.

 

Try something for me, play a track off Beatport in the online player so the audio plays through your internal soundcard.

Eject your DVD drive even though it is empty.

Tell me if the audio playing from Beatport stutters.

 

Hey Quartz,

Did the studio 17 have the combo port ESATA/USB?
Just wanted to know as our external HD's have the eSATA capability and I'd like to keep the hd's off usb to allow for better audio8 performance and possible Midi use.

 

Hey Ira,

It has eSata, USB, HDMI and Firewire

 

@ iRock, if you are buying enclosures for E-Sata drives, pay attention to the type and brand. We use some USB and E-Sata for external ad-hoc data system backups in the systems lab I manage. The USB/E-Sata combos get poor performance compared to good quality E-Sata only Enclosures.

Phil

 

agreed. Lacie drives seem to be getting the best reviews on newegg. WD is now pushing their new line of Esata Drives which are only $50-75 more than their regular usb 2.0 versions. I cannot wait to transfer to Esata and have it work properly.

Is anyone really having problems with Vista on PC's? I mean with Traktor of course. I think that if I only have traktor installed on a new laptop, it should run pretty flawlessly without having to do anything major to it...

 

Talking about DPC spikes, my first question is: Which SATA driver do you use? Intel Storage Manager, version?
For me (& my Dell E6400), 8.6 & 8.7 were big "spike-producers".
Regarding eSATA enclosures, it depends on the chipset.
I've made good experiences with a 2,5'' hdd case from Revoltec with a JMicron chipset. Before that, I tried a cheap no name eSATA case which caused a freeze while booting the BIOS!
And no probs so far with my Latitude ...

 

Yeah, I've been using these enclosures for the last 2 or 3 years.

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=17167&vpn=NST%2D360SU%2DBK&manufacture=Vantec

They've worked really good. Cheap and easy to put together.
As we were using the old Final Scratch 2 which is firewire I didn't have to worry about shared usb resources so I'd use the usb on the enclosure for gigs and the eSATA to sync my tracks on the Desktop. Which was way better than waiting for the usb sync of all those analyze file stripes. =)

I never did any real tests on the speed but as long as I can use the eSATA on the Studio 17 that's one less thing to worry about performance wise on the usb for the Audio 8.