Laptop recommendations?

[JackChase]

So, I'm going to be picking up a laptop to run a mixtrack pro 2, and I'll purchase traktor 2 to go with it. I would like to have the option to upgrade my gear without changing the laptop, and I have a budget of around £500 tops. Therefore:
Is there a laptop that fits these specifications?
If not, what specs are recommended?
Is 500 too low/too high? (Any spare money will go to new kit)

[c0nsul]

Get at least 8 GB RAM, an INTEL processor (i5 or i7) and instead of a hard disk, choose a SSD.

[Patch]

I too am looking for a new laptop.

Can anyone recommend specific makes/models (links?) that are particularly good value for money? Special offers? Free upgrades, etc...?

Looking for the most grunt for the least money. Something that can potentially run Traktor (DVS) AND Ableton Live (at the same time) with DVS (scratch) suitable latency.

[JackChase]

Okay, so after looking, I found a laptop for 570 which had the following specs:
Screen size - 15.6 in - No
Processor - Intel Core i7 4700MQ - 2.4 GHz
RAM - 8 GB
Hard Drive - 1 TB
Operating System - Windows 8.1 (64-Bit)
Optical Drive - DVD Re-Writer
Touchscreen - No
This would be fine right? Is there anything there that I've missed that makes it unsuitable? (I'd buy an ssd separately when I can afford it). Is i7 necessary? Can I go i5 and save some money to put towards other parts, seeing as I'm a beginner?

Jack

[SlvrDragon50]

Looks fine. i5 plenty.

Stick to ASUS or Lenovo IMO. Maybe Samsung but they're kinda pricey.

[ZooTV]

Stick to ASUS or Lenovo IMO.

+1. I've personally owned a Lenovo laptop (T150) and currently own an S6000 tablet. Very solid and reliable. Didn't have much bloatware either. Very vanilla. The Asus my sister has and is very solid. It did take a while to de-bloat though.

The i7 is not THAT necessary to have if you're a beginner. If you want to run Ableton and/or traktor, an SSD and 8GB+ of RAM would be most advantageous. A touchscreen is not necessary, get a tablet you want touch. Just take care that once you have a windows laptop, you'd be better off to de-bloat the crapware on there, minimize background processes, turn off wireless while performing, and modify your power settings so that the laptop runs on max performance settings when plugged in or on battery. Make a custom power profile for that, as if the laptop ever disconnects accidentally while performing, the switch from a max performance profile to low performance battery saving profile will cause a stutter in the system that may or may not crash some programs.

Do your homework and do your due diligence, and you could end up with a machine that's cheaper, and runs just as good or better than a garden-of-eden Apple product

[JackChase]

Okay, thanks! Definitely a relief to here this, i7s start to get a little pricey. With regards to the SSD, would there be noticeably worse performance if I bought an external SSD, and used that? Just trying to balance needs and wants. I agree with the Lenovo comment, friends have described them as a good mix of performance/price.

[Patch]

i7 Laptop for $570?

You guys have it GREAT for laptops...

[ZooTV]

With regards to the SSD, would there be noticeably worse performance if I bought an external SSD, and used that? Just trying to balance needs and wants.

It all comes down to price point. If you're willing to deal with a price bump that comes with an SSD, it is well worth it. You will see an extremely noticeable improvement in the "snappyness" of your OS. Especially, when it comes to gigging live, if (knock on wood) your laptop takes a dump, and you have to restart it, restarting windows on an SSD takes a matter of seconds. You could quite possibly, if you did your due diligence, have your setup up and running again in under 20-30 seconds. Which is lightening fast.

I'd recommend opting for the internal drive. Laptop drives are generally easily removable via removing the battery to access the HD hatch. RAM is usually easily upgrade-able as well using the same method. The reason why i reccomend this is because if the drive is internal, it would most likely use the SATA method of communication, which is extremely fast. Having your OS and traktor + ableton etc installed on an external drive is risky/slower. Yes, USB 3.0 is fast, but the latest SATA revisions are faster and more robust. USB is heavy on the CPU, where as SATA uses less resources and thus, you will experience very low latency. If you have a huge library of samples/music, use the external drive for that. Then before a gig, copy over what you need to the SSD. But bring everything just in case

DISCLAIMER: I dont know how things are these days, but i have heard from many people, both retail and professional, that SSDs are a tricky business as they are prone to fail. Apparantly, and please correct me if i'm wrong, but they have a certain number of read/write cycles that limits their life. Not sure how long this is, or if this is a problem anymore with current drives, but i'd investigate the kind of drive your laptop comes with and its reliability. I can't really reccomend any because A) my age old home computer does not have one and B) In my work place, we only use industrial grade SSDs, which are expensive and probably inaccessible to consumers :P As the old adage goes:

ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR SHIT

[teknik1200]

SSDs are fine, in my line of work I deal with harddrives and have a few three and four drive RAID0 arrays at my desk for the sake of testing.

I've had one SSD drive need it's firmware re-flashed over two and a half years and three spinning drives die during the same time span.

All harddrives fail. Getting 450 MB/s off a single drive is pretty nice.

One thing about the i7 is that your machine will last longer into the future. New softwares are great at sucking that thing down. At the same time computers are a lot faster than they were a few years ago.