Need new computer
 

Hi guys hope you can help me out here, i'm at present using a windows based 1.8 g pentium M laptop with 1 gig of ram which up untill now has served me rather well, but lately i have been using a lot more plugs and im finding that it's starting to struggle, pops n clicks and finaly a crash. So can any of you guys sugest a replacement desktop processor configuration that will give me a substantial improvement, i cant afford an i7 at the present time, my budgrt is £500.00- £600.00. Or does anyone know of any base units, also would increasing my ram in my present setup realy make that much difference. cheers

If it needs to be a laptop/windows, i would look at any of the i3/i5 range and try to get into x64bit with 6GBram...loads of headroom and fun. Or 4GB ram with Windows x32.
Laptop specifics are more to your personal needs...check out the Samsungs they are really good spec and value at the moment.

I assume you're on XP 32 bit?

In my opinion yes, you are going to see a lot of difference in anything you upgrade to, even at the budget range you've described. My ultraportable which I bought in 2005 has a 1.8ghz Centrino (which I think is the same as the chip you described), and honestly I never even tried making music on it (I simply can't imagine trying).

When you say base units, do you mean desktop machine? If that's the case, YES you will no doubt get much more music-creation bang for the buck with a desktop machine, but for music makers (especially live performers) the portability is a nice thing to have. I don't gig live and don't need to move around, so I have a big heavy (but way powerful) desktop. If I sank the same money into a laptop I would have had a nice laptop but ultimately a much less powerful machine -- there's a price to portability. Even at the highend, the fastest laptops you can buy do not perform the same as the fastest desktop.

I would think that for your budget you could probably get an i5 class desktop, which is going to blow you away compared to what you're used to in terms of the plugins it can handle. I still put an emphasis on clock speed for music making over cores, but in my opinion you should still make sure you get 4 cores, because plugin makers are getting better at multi-threading.

Find a good dealer or some nerdy friends or enthusiasts who will make a custom rig - do not even bother going to normal stores to buy a PC. I got a new rig assembled for 1000AUD, quad core 1gb video card 4gb ddr3ram, tower and motherboard that would have cost 2k+ preassembled at another store, with lower specced ram and cpu.

I don't know much about computer prices in the UK, but with the dollar equivalent of that sum you can definitely buy an i7-class clone in the US. A desktop, of course, laptops tend to be more expensive.