firepod compatability

S

starsxandxslits

New member
i own a toshiba satellite laptop with an ati radeon 200m...2gig of ram, 1.5 ghz celeron processor. i was reading on presonus's site about compatability issues with other ati chipsets (not the one i have) and it said that celerons are not recommended. i was wondering if anyone has a similar outfit as mine and if they had any problems. any response one way or the other would be fab.
 
Celeron will not work for heavy audio, that's a fact. I believe that you should change your laptop for a pentium M. Toshiba is also known for many problems as general laptops... there are tons of toshiba that have electrostatic problems (depends where you are from).

Advice : Sell it and buy something else (dell, asus, alienware, etc)
 
you obviously have plenty of RAM but I agree with tenkas, I think your processor will seriously let your audio system down!

It was designed for business men who need MS Office, Internet Explorer and Outlook lol.... not for us audio geeks ! :(
 
The thing is, if you want to add anything to the tracks (plug-ins like EQ, etc.) that's where you're going to start needing processing power. The initial tracking doesn't require tremendous amounts of CPU (not from my experience anyway), it's after the tracking when you'll need it. How many tracks are you planning on at one time?

The Firepod panel does have options for CPU (If I remember it's Low, Medium, High - don't have one anymore), so you could always bump that down to Low. Personally, I wouldn't want to dink around attemping to get everything working smoothly, so I'd semi-agree that a new laptop wouldn't be a bad idea.
 
i will be recording no more than 8 tracks. i mainly want to use this computer for trcking and use my desktop for mastering/mixing. i understand that plugins are cpu intensive, but wouldn't it be alright to track with?
 
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It should be OK to track with, as long as your hard disk can keep up.

That's what I do with my laptop - use it for tracking coz it's nice & quiet. Then move the project over to the desktop for mixing etc.

I've got the ati mobility chip in my laptop. Presonus specifically mentions that one as the one NOT to get, but I've never had a problem with it.
 
ok, so you use a firepod with that same chipset? what kind of laptop do you have...i know it reccomends against celeron m, but i know it's more b/c it can''t handle the fx and whatnot.
 
Though it isn't much... I can say that my dad does some video work on his Toshiba laptop quite succefully (just to balance the hate scale)...

At the end of the day, you'll have a hard time convincing me that Dell makes a higher quality product than Toshiba (who has helped to develop so many audio-relevant technologies)....

Don't get me wrong though. I wouldn't fight a war over it... Just my take on it all...
 
Celeron M is the same as Pentium M but with a smaller cache. Otherwise they're the exact same processor.

There are a number of bespoke audio PC manufacturers over here who are using the Celeron Ms on relatively expensive laptops. They're fine for what you want to do ... if you run into working limitations it's probably more to do with your hard disk speed and possibly not having streamlined your Windows install enough.

Nik
 
do you think i would be able to run a miniamal amout of plugins? just compressors, eq, reverb on some things...i planned on getting an external hd anyway, so i know that that wouldn't be an isssue, and i know the winxp daw tweaks...so should i be ok for what i'm trying to do?
 
I don't think you'd have any major problems then. It's far better specced than my old 1Ghz Athlon which had 256mb RAM and ran XP and SX 2 happily with 40+ tracks and comps and EQ in use on most of them. So give it a go. :)
 
As a general rule, track count is determined by how well your hard drive can keep up, while the number of plugins is determined by how grunty your cpu is and how much ram you've got.
EQ & compressors shouldn't be too much of a problem, but reverbs can use a lot more cycles
 
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