…or can one machine do it all?
Currently have a Micron 300mhz PII w/192mb RAM, 8gb HD and a noisy, Creative AWE64 sound card. It’s running Win 98 and an assortment of applications – Eudora mail, Internet Explorer, PhotoShop, Word, Sound Forge XP etc. Lately it’s giving me lots of trouble – running very slow & crashing often, even during the simplest tasks. Norton System Doctor is indicating 100% CPU usage at all times – even when I quit every application… but mostly I’m just tired of this 3.5 year old PC and ready for something new.
I’m thinking of building or buying a DAW machine and using this machine as the only PC in the house for all of our (wife & I) computing needs. My budget is less than $1000 including soundcard & software, but maybe I can recycle some of my existing system (17” monitor, speakers, Sony CD-RW CRX100E, CD-ROM & floppy drives, 56k modem). My primary goal with audio is to transfer LPs and cassettes to CD, but I might also like to mess about with recording guitars, vocals, etc. again if possible.
Can one machine do it all? If you’ve got all the stuff your average home user needs (modem, e-mail, browser, antivirus, a few games, word processing and (in our case) PhotoShop), can the same system function well as an audio workstation? Will antivirus or other applications cause problems with recording apps?
My wife understands that the current computer is old and dying – I’m hoping the replacement will give me some DAW capabilities. If you think it will work, help me spend my money – what kind of machine, soundcard, OS, etc. would you recommend with my sub $1000 budget?
Thanks for your help-
Currently have a Micron 300mhz PII w/192mb RAM, 8gb HD and a noisy, Creative AWE64 sound card. It’s running Win 98 and an assortment of applications – Eudora mail, Internet Explorer, PhotoShop, Word, Sound Forge XP etc. Lately it’s giving me lots of trouble – running very slow & crashing often, even during the simplest tasks. Norton System Doctor is indicating 100% CPU usage at all times – even when I quit every application… but mostly I’m just tired of this 3.5 year old PC and ready for something new.
I’m thinking of building or buying a DAW machine and using this machine as the only PC in the house for all of our (wife & I) computing needs. My budget is less than $1000 including soundcard & software, but maybe I can recycle some of my existing system (17” monitor, speakers, Sony CD-RW CRX100E, CD-ROM & floppy drives, 56k modem). My primary goal with audio is to transfer LPs and cassettes to CD, but I might also like to mess about with recording guitars, vocals, etc. again if possible.
Can one machine do it all? If you’ve got all the stuff your average home user needs (modem, e-mail, browser, antivirus, a few games, word processing and (in our case) PhotoShop), can the same system function well as an audio workstation? Will antivirus or other applications cause problems with recording apps?
My wife understands that the current computer is old and dying – I’m hoping the replacement will give me some DAW capabilities. If you think it will work, help me spend my money – what kind of machine, soundcard, OS, etc. would you recommend with my sub $1000 budget?
Thanks for your help-