Will my P3 650mhz laptop hack it?

[thisisbrianly]

I just picked up a 5 year old Toshiba Portege 7220cte laptop and am wondering if it'd be of ANY value for recording audio. Its a 650mhz Pentium 3 running Windows XP Home and has the max 320mb RAM installed. Do any of you know anything about this computer?

I bought it to surf the net and do documents and such, but it'd be nice to be able to lay down a track or two......I record using Audacity thru an M-Audio Mobilepre USB and usually only track one track at a time.

Will it be able to handle basic recording? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[guitar junkie]

you should be able to do a benchmark testing in Audacity and it will tell you how many tracks you can run...

if you have the money you might want to really think about putting the most RAM you can shove in that machine.... load it up and it should rock out for ya just fine...

and if it really works out for Audio then grab a copy of REAPER off the net, use it... kicks Audacity!

 

[thisisbrianly]

you should be able to do a benchmark testing in Audacity and it will tell you how many tracks you can run...

Thanks junkie…I'm trying to find the benchmarking tool right now, but am having no luck….do you know how to do this test?

 

[guitar junkie]

you may need the latest beta version to do this.... it has been a while since i did much with this software.

 

[cephus]

I have a shitte laptop like that. I have used it to record ideas. The sound card is way, way crappy and not even worth using. Looking into PCMCIA sound cards that would work showed me that my cheap laptop would be fairly expensive to make useable.

That said, I never had any latency issues laying on tracks. the only problem I had was the shittiness of the sound quality as rendered by a built-in soundcard.