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One last thing. Check out this site: http://www.intel.com/products/notebook/processors/index.htm Click on the various models and look at the specs around clock speed, L2 cache, etc. Also, don't bee fooled by the Centrino/Intel Pentium M Process clock speeds...they show as lower than the prior Intel processors, but they are technically much more efficient and exhibit faster performance because Centrino uses a different technology. They can't be compared directly because Centrino works much more efficiently than other Intel processors, in the way it allocates its processing power, instructions, etc. If you internalize these specs, then when you go to buy a PC notebook with an Intel processor, you'll know what you are getting rather than letting the idiot sales person try to lead you to one option or flavor of the day, based on what their boss is asking them to push through the pipeline at that particular time. You could go to the AMD website and look at their processor specs too. I have a Compaq/HP consumer notebook - a Presario 2525US with a 2.4 GHz desktop processor, Intel Pentium 4. You'll know if a notebook uses a desktop versus mobile processor, because they are noisy and the notebooks are thick and heavy. I would avoid these. I plan to personally buy a notebook with a mobile processor next time. Quite, fast, efficient...no fan noise getting into your recordings, etc. With my current notebook, I am able to run two or three VST plugins in ProTools and the Mobius looper VST with no problems. And ProTools sucks up some processing power too. If I ran my VSTs in something like AudioMulch, it would perform better. I have a friend who bought a notebook, but decided to cut corners on the processor....I noticed a huge difference in latency and performance with ProTools. We both had notebooks with similar RAM, XP, and hard drive configurations. The only difference was our processors. It was very interesting. On ProTools in the Playback Engine settings, I can run my hardware buffer size at 256 samples with no latency. He had to run his at 128, but then when he started to record it would crash ProTools once in a while....lower buffer size, less latency, but more risk of the crash. I found that 256 yielded no latency and no crashes for me, unless I'm playing back a lot of tracks and mixing down...then I bump my bufffer up to 512 where latency is not an issue because I'm not recording. This prevents any sort of ProTools crash. It's something about how our two processors allocate resources for memory, cache, processing, etc. I wish I knew the details, but the only difference I could tell was that he was using a less expesive processor...other than this, it's all a mystery to me. Point being, I just won't cut corners on a processor. Kris ************************************************************************ ************** Krispen Hartung http://www.krispenhartung.com info@krispenhartung.com View improvisational / real-time looping videos: http://www.myweb.cableone.net/chagstrom2/music/kris-hartung/catalogue.ht m#videos Interactive tour of my gear: http://www.boisemusicians.com/gear.htm -----Original Message----- From: hazard factor [mailto:artists@hazardfactor.com] Sent: Sunday, March 13, 2005 2:43 PM To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com Subject: RE: All-Laptop live?? (was RE: RE: A poll--shoes off?) With all the talk of programs, does anyone have any spec recommendations for a PC laptop capable of live looping, and running a few softsynths at once? Dave Eichenberger http://www.hazardfactor.com