Hi all,
Trying to get my home studio in some kind of usable state and would love some advice on spec to minimise spend.
I have an old laptop that I use for a DAW, and its performance is awful. It is old, but it has *always been sluggish since new* despite my having spent on an i7 chip, which makes me suspicious that I messed up when speccing it at purchase. I've used Reaper, and am currently using Tracktion 6 and performance has been the same for both.
I record direct via an MAudio Fasttrack interface, and use Addictive Drums and a combination of various guitar amp VSTs including Guitar Rig, and a mixed bag of other plugins for EQ, compression etc. The ceiling for everything seizing up and the sound dropping out is pretty low, say, 6 tracks with up to 5 plugins on each.
Applications take a long time to load, web pages and tabs are excruciatingly slow. I completely reloaded windows and removed all bloat that I could (it's just the DAW and the web for file transfer, plenty of diskspace) but performance didn't improve at all.
I'm running Windows 7 on:
HP Pavilion dv6 Notebook PC
Product No. LZ436EA#ABU
I7-2630QM CPU @2.00GHz
Slot 1 2GB SODIMM 1333MHz Hynix
Slot 2 4GB SODIMM 1333MHz Micron Tech
I have a recollection that I can only bump the RAM TO 8GB maximum (no idea if this is true), and I'll be delighted to do this if an extra 2 will make a tangible difference, but I'd love some advice on anyhing else that might help:
- is faster RAM a thing? Would that help?
- would an SSD help? Are they cheap?
- Windows upgrade?
- is the whole thing just unupgradably screwed for the modern world?
Your advice on cost effective improvements would be gratefully received.
Trying to get my home studio in some kind of usable state and would love some advice on spec to minimise spend.
I have an old laptop that I use for a DAW, and its performance is awful. It is old, but it has *always been sluggish since new* despite my having spent on an i7 chip, which makes me suspicious that I messed up when speccing it at purchase. I've used Reaper, and am currently using Tracktion 6 and performance has been the same for both.
I record direct via an MAudio Fasttrack interface, and use Addictive Drums and a combination of various guitar amp VSTs including Guitar Rig, and a mixed bag of other plugins for EQ, compression etc. The ceiling for everything seizing up and the sound dropping out is pretty low, say, 6 tracks with up to 5 plugins on each.
Applications take a long time to load, web pages and tabs are excruciatingly slow. I completely reloaded windows and removed all bloat that I could (it's just the DAW and the web for file transfer, plenty of diskspace) but performance didn't improve at all.
I'm running Windows 7 on:
HP Pavilion dv6 Notebook PC
Product No. LZ436EA#ABU
I7-2630QM CPU @2.00GHz
Slot 1 2GB SODIMM 1333MHz Hynix
Slot 2 4GB SODIMM 1333MHz Micron Tech
I have a recollection that I can only bump the RAM TO 8GB maximum (no idea if this is true), and I'll be delighted to do this if an extra 2 will make a tangible difference, but I'd love some advice on anyhing else that might help:
- is faster RAM a thing? Would that help?
- would an SSD help? Are they cheap?
- Windows upgrade?
- is the whole thing just unupgradably screwed for the modern world?
Your advice on cost effective improvements would be gratefully received.