should i even bother with my laptop?

osus

osus

New member
hello,

i've been looking into doing some field recording (at school rehearsal studios) and had thought about using my laptop with a portable preamp/phantom interface. however, my laptop is rather venerable by today's standards. i own audition which runs beautifully on my monstrous desktop but i'm worried that in order to get it to run even well enough to track stereo on my laptop i'd need to wipe it and invest so much in upgrades that i might be better off buying something else altogether (another laptop or a stand-alone).

laptop so-called stats:

micron transport lt
750 mhz celeron (uch)
128 megs ram, upgradeable to a max of 192 (uch)
20 meg internal hard disk @ 4200 rpms
windows 2000 professional

and most of the hard disk will have to be cleared out for audition to have any leg room.

the other big pain is my pcmcia port seems to be broken, and i only have a single usb port which i imagine is only usb1. this means firewire and usb2 are out of the question without a trip to the repair shop (and i can only assume that as with all things computer it would be expensive).

in the opinion of this community, is it worth messing around with, or should i just move on?

thanks!
 
Thats a tough call.

I've made a pretty good career out of making things work that shouldn't- but a 750 Celeron isn't going to give you a whole lot of return for the trouble. Have you checked Audition's minumum reqs. to see if it will even run on 2000 with that little ram?

You could, with an inexpensive USB interface (which are all USB1) record stereo pretty easily on such a machine- even 4 tracks. My first digital rig was a PIII 800 with a Tascam USB428. If I hadn't gotten a job offer at a Pro Tools facitily (which required me to know Pro Tools) I probably would have kept on with that system quite a while longer.

It is useful, I just wouldn't throw too much money at it with testing the heck out of it to see if you'll get some return for the investment.

Take care,
Chris
 
thanks for the advice--i don't know why i hadn't bothered trying to install audition to test it out...

well, it installed, but not only does it take incredibly long to load but i apparently don't have enough ram even to playback the fabulously cheesy 'welcome to adobe audition' session that it starts up with. i'm guessing i could pare down a lot of unneccessary processes--but i'm also guessing it won't afford me much. nor do i think the extra 64 megs of ram i could squeeze in would provide the titanium spinal reinforcement the camel needs to keep its back from breaking.

thanks again for the input!
 
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