Which Laptop do you use

[werock]

I'd like to know who uses a laptop, and how well the model you use works.

I use a Dell Inspiron 1525 running AV Linux 4.2 - the Dell is not that good I continually struggle to get decent performance out of it. Some days it's fine, others days it gives me xrun hell.

My previous laptop was trodden on by one of the kids, the Dell was the insurance replacement.

[SR]

I have a Toshiba A505. I bought it because of the specs, but have regretted it ever since. Just to boot and have power management functional requires that I run patch provided by Intel as a "here try this" during the troubleshooting process. The patch applies cleany against a 2.6.33 kernel with RT patch and is part of the mainline kernel as of 2.6.35. However, since the RT patches haven't made it to the newer kernels I'm stuck running an older custom kernel.

Otherwise the laptop is great and very fast.

[Havoc]

Dell Vostro 1700. About 3 years old now. Acceptable but nothing stellar. Got it because it has a separate numeric keyboard, place for a second HD, separate video and a non-glossy screen. Running stock Gentoo (as far as that's possible) without any issues. Never bothered getting wireless running.

[raboof]

I used to use a Dell Latitude D610, which worked quite well.

I now have a Dell Latitude E6510: much better specs, but terrible audio performance. I wonder if it's due to IRQ sharing - in that case running a kernel with the realtime patches might help, but the video card doesn't seem to work with 2.6.33 kernels and earlier, and there's no realtime patches for post-2.6.33 kernels...

[autostatic]

I'm very happy with my HP DV7-1070ED. For audio it's ok too, the onboard card performs quite ok and my USB audio card works well too. FireWire works also but the FireWire controller shares its IRQ with a gazillion other devices so I haven't stressed it, it's not so reliable.
I also have a Packard Bell Dot M/A.NL/202, a netbook with a 11.6" screen and an AMD 64bit CPU. Just received a new CPU for it, I'm going to replace the single core L110 with a dual core L310 Works well too, I use it on stage sometimes, but I hit the limits of this netbook too fast so hopefully the CPU upgrade improves the performance. When I load a vocoder plug-in and max it for example the little fellow stalls. Oh yeah, the chipset responsible scaling the CPU is buggy so I can't use ondemand, it will freeze the netbook after a while. No biggie, I don't use ondemand anyway.

Best,

Jeremy

[MattKingUSA]

I used an HP TC4400 tablet. It works perfectly with everything I've tried on it. Good for audio, video, graphics and games. It's also got great battery life but I'm getting ready to upgrade to the new one that's touch screen without the pen.

[devilock76]

Toshiba Satellite A205-S5853. Rather a modest machine but it has firewire and runs well under Fedora. I use fedora as I have been using CentOS for servers and like having synchronicity between workstation and server environments. Although lately I have considered experimenting with using FreeBSD for a music station as CentOS is starting to get on my nerves. I love how easy CentOS is to administer and it is rock solid stable. However I find FreeBSD is faster at times and CentOS is just so behind on development tools I want to use in the development repos. My servers are more for my purposes as a developer than a systems administrator.

OK so rambled off topic but oh well.

Ken

[werock]

Thanks for the info guys. I'm wondering if some the problems with my laptop stem from the 5400 rpm drive.

ideally I'd like to use a desktop but don't have the space, but I'm seriously considering getting a new laptop...

[devilock76]

Thanks for the info guys. I'm wondering if some the problems with my laptop stem from the 5400 rpm drive.

ideally I'd like to use a desktop but don't have the space, but I'm seriously considering getting a new laptop...

HD speed should really only come into play with multi track recording. That I have found is the biggest area HD speed comes to play. Well playing large samples as well. however in the latter RAM can make up for that. Also what is your swappiness set to? Most people here advocate if you are serious about recording then record to a second physical hard drive that is seperate from the OS and applications. That way that drive is only spinning to recording data. Personally I don;t do this but then again it is difficuly with a laptop to have that setup internal. If you find you need it I would consider an external HD that can connect via Firewire.

Ken

[werock]

I did adjust the swappiness recently, the real time config script highlighted that - everything in the checklist comes up green

I have been thinking of using an external drive, but I'm starting to think my problems may be something else - I tend to get xruns/drop outs when softsynths are first instantiated in a track, which I would guess is not HD related.

[autostatic]

I tend to get xruns/drop outs when softsynths are first instantiated in a track, which I would guess is not HD related.

What soundcard and JACK settings are you using?

Best,

Jeremy

[devilock76]

What AutoStatic asked, as well as what is your processor speed? Also (and this is a big one) have you set the governor through cpufreq-utils to prevent CPU scaling. Softsynths typically hit hardest on the CPU side and Jack is not happy with surprise CPU scaling.

Ken

[werock]

Ok, here's my Jack settings:

Frames/Period :256
Sample Rate: 44100
Periods Buffer: 3
Port Max: 256
Timeout: 2000
Start Delay: 2

Realtime is checked (everyting else is unchecked)

All other settings are at Default. My interface is a Lexicon Omega (USB).

I've always considered these fairly conservative settings - I'll try upping the Frames/Period to 512 tonight, although that gives a latency of 34ms.

I have set the governor to performance, although oddly on one of the cpu cores it often seems to reset itself back to powersave, which then only goes back to peformance if I run the QuickScan script.