A what up fam ! Im looking to buy a Notebook for recording and production purposes. Anybody know some good ones or what I should look for ? My price budget is around 500-600 $

don't get something with an intel atom chip. they keep notebooks small but they suck. for 500 you can get something awesome the way the market is right now.

Avoid anything with Intel GMA graphics chips, they suck. If it aint got nVidia or ATi graphics walk on by.

You want at least a 2 ghz cpu, preferably dual core. Look for at least 2gb of ramm but at your price range 3 or 4gb should be easy to find.

For the sake of compatiblility I'd say go with a 32 bit OS (Windows 7 32bit), and avoid Windows Vista like the plague.

At least a 250gb hard drive, need room to store all that audio.

i've been pretty happy with my dell vostro, but the sound card bloooows. maybe with a USB breakout box i'd have better luck. but pound for pound, great pc.

a friend just got a netbook. soooper tiny, but with a 180 gig drive

maybe that ^^ kind of set up with a USB (or firewire) sound card would be a great combo for the price (and netboox usually run windows XP rather than Vista or sys 7).

three things you need to know if you buy any sort of laptop
1. turn that shit off!! dont put it to sleep if you can turn it off.
2. buy a spare battery if you can...
3. be aware of the power level you are using "battery saver, balanced, high powered"
people run it in high performance mode without turning it off often can expect that the thing wont last it past the years end without a more powerful house fan running on it.

so if you are only looking at web pages, use power saver, and when you need the power turn it up.

this also means that you should consider that in power saver mode you are running less the half the notebook's power. keep that in mind. so in order to keep your lap from burning up, the comp might only be running at 1.0 ghz and 1.0 gig ram.

yeah stay away from vista. i would go with xp just because its so light compared to the new os'...or linux. i recorded a whole album on linux ubuntu w/ a laptop. some dealers will give you a discount (-the price of windows) if you choose to have linux installed instead.

vista isnt as bad as its made out to be

you just have to adjust some settings and turn off the "grandma" features and you are good to go.

windows 7 is basically "service pack 3" of vista

id say stay away from vista, its like windows ME, the version they put out for suckers and before they worked out all the bugs. xp is where its at but it seems like all the computers are coming with vista, but you still gotta stay away unless you like answering the same question 10 times like, would you like to save and are you sure. such a pain in the ass. how can they make xp then flip the script with vista, its like the new microsoft word program, its like "what the fuck happened to word" and the new file type docx. microsoft is weird.

^^
you can turn all that stuff off man. (except for the word thing obviously) i changed two things and now it doesnt do any lame shit like that and it runs much smoother. (DEP and superfetch fyi)

theres plenty of vista/7 features that make it worthwhile and not like youll be able to buy a laptop with xp new

You can get some really good stuff in your price range if you keep an eye out. I bought my laptop half a year ago for 400€ - without OS. I've got a 2GHz dual core, 250GB hdd and 4GB RAM (bought 1GB extra for 20 bucks). You might want to invest some of the saved money in an extra soundcard cause most laptops don't have a good one. If you care about playing recent games keep in mind what Esrom said, if not, save the money and download a SNES emulator ;D

My recommendation: If you want to save money and have access to a WinXP CD, go that way, if not: buy Win7 with the laptop. It's quite smooth and you don't need to fight with stuff like driver installation or accessing a network at all. But there's nothing you can do with 7 that you can't do with XP. I tried to install Linux on my PC last week just to try it and find ot what's so special about it but I didn't take me one hour to uninstall it again

Hurlingdervish's tip is also important, try to find out how long the battery lasts. It sucks if you have to connect to a power outlet every two hours. Mine can last up to 4,5 hours. You can also take your battery out if you've got the wire plugged in, that'll expand the battery's lifespan.

Dang thanks for the help everyone there some really good stuff here.

Now im goin to ask for your opinion. Should I sell my MPC2kXL to use The money towards a new notebook PC ? Im thinking I can do everything the MPC does on ablenton right ?? Maybe even more

What you guys think??? im kinda stuck. The only reason im considering this is because I hate not beign able to mix tracks on my MPC and im staring to experiment more with my sound.

its up to you man

i hate selling gear...

so i dont.

i would just wait till you can afford a lappy without selling the mpc

Hmm, I wouldn't wanna recommend you to sell your MPC. You'd surely miss it afterwards.

Yea I prob wont sell it. I dont want to have any regrets once the deal is done. Thanks for all the help fellas.