"I've got audio pops and clicks." "My video is jumpy." "My system freezes and crashes."

Tips for Buying and Using New PCs To Assure Quality Performance with Advanced Audio Applications

Buyer Beware! That new PC or laptop you just bought may be a piece of crap no matter how much you paid for it or who made it. No one model of laptop or PC is created equal. Different models have different chipsets with different sets of software drivers. All those latest whizbang chipsets and features may have firmware or driver problems that have yet to be resolved by the PC manufacturer and/or chipset manufacturer. Some PC manufacturers right now just plain suck. The following tips come from my 10+ years of professional experience in technical and service support for a very large host of PC desktop/laptop/server-related systems.

1. Before purchasing, DO YOUR RESEARCH. Buy from a currently reputable manufacturer. The quality of your manufacturer, in terms of both the manufacturing and service/support process, varies greatly accross-the-board:

Some current highly respected manufacturers are:

-- Apple (Desktops/Laptops)
-- Lenovo--formerly IBM, still also branded as IBM (Desktops/Laptops)
-- Toshiba (Laptops)
-- Asus (Laptops)

Some current mid-level respected manufacturers.

-- HP/Compaq (Desktops/Laptops)

Some current low-level respected manufacturers

-- Sony (have always sucked--they're history is tied up in bottom line consumer electronics--think about it!)
-- Dell (just plain sucks now for everything)

It is important to note that a few years ago, Dell systems were considered some of the best. Today, they are considered some of the worst. Oh how the mighty have fallen!

2. Don't buy off-the-shelf and don't buy cheap:

-- Off-the-shelf bargain systems are bargains for a reason
-- Even if not on sale, most off-the-shelf systems are configured for the lowest common denominator of user

3. Customize your system--Order direct from the manufacturer and be knowledgable from the start

--Research your PC's subsystem characteristics. Know exactly what you're buying

--Make sure that your chipset specifications (video, audio, disk controller, etc.) are adequate and that there are no significant issues with them. Do research on the chipsets and manufacturers themselves.

--Make sure that your chipsets have a history of reliability, that they are not too brand-spanking new. New chipset hardware oten comes with new software drivers that have bugs in them. Do research on the chipsets and manufacturers themselves.

--Make sure that the PC manufacturer is releasing up-to-date drivers for these chipsets for your operating system and that they are not significantly behind the in their packaging and release of drivers from the chipset manufacturer itself.

--Avoid Windows Vista at this time--Vista chipset drivers are currently full of bugs, full of bugs, full of bugs. Vista itself is currently full of bugs. Hurry! Windows XP Pro is only available through June of this year, unless you install it yourself (available through December of this year).

--Buy Apple. Apple has a consistent, highly respected history of stability with respect to their hardware and software, and they have a history of being a preferred platform for the audio and video pro. With Apple, stability and reliability is a hallmark of the brand.

4. Get a Professional 3rd-party audio device to use with your new system

--Most packaged audio devices on laptops and desktops are inferior. Unless you have purchased a high-end system and you know that your audio chipset on that system is the highest quality of consumer or pro-caliber, do your research first and then get a supplementary USB or PCI multichannel ASIO sound device from one of the pros like:

M-Audio
Audioscience
Echo
Edirol
RME
Lynx Studio Technology
etc., etc., etc.

--then, disable your onboard sound in your system bios entirely and witness the crystal clarity and dynamic range of your analog sound outputs.

5. Build your own or have a pro build a professional system for you

Those of us who build our own systems appreciate, understand and witness the serious performance differences between the more generic manufactured systems and our own. Everything can be researched and individually specified right down to the baseline hardware to provide the best performance output for the price.

In terms of portability, although you won't find too many custom laptop builders out there (they do exist), you can build (or have built) a highly-portable studio-quality production workstation in a thin desktop or 2U/1U server case that is lightweight, will fit in a gig bag and/or even easily install in a rack on location if you have an ongoing regular gig. Furthermore, the performance of a professional PC workstation of this nature (with multiple dual core Pentium/Athlon/Xeon/Opteron chips) will always outperform, even custom, laptop counterparts. Furthermore, in terms of service and support, finding a high-quality, high-end workstation or server builder, can be a joy and worth every penny of the additional expense.

Warning: Opting to build your own system is a serious undertaking. Even opting to have one built for you is not without risk. Know what you're doing or know who's doing it for you. Your friend who is technically inclined is probably not a good choice in this regard unless he or she has significant reputable experience as a custom systems builder. Those who specialize in the custom building of gaming PCs are probably not good choices in this regard. With audio production systems, you need stability balanced with performance. Gaming specialists generally favor peformance--overclocking, et.al.-- to the exception of everything else.

6. After purchase, remove all the pre-installed "gunk" from your system

Once of the biggest issues with new, manufacturer-provided PCs today is the issue of all the software bloat that comes pre-installed on the computer when you get it. You will notice that there are often as many as a dozen items running down in your Windows system tray for all kinds of software, sucking up your memory and system power. What the manufacturer pre-installed in your system is almost never your best choice in software. Even the provision of Symantec and McAfee antivirus packages can be troublesome, as these packages are highly invasive, overbloated, and take control of many aspects of your system that you should be in charge of yourself. The installation of numerous PC-support packages from the manufacturer is also troublesome. You don't need all these whizbang auto-update, auto-management features here. Many, like a firewall and wireless configuration interfaces are already provided default in the Windows OS. There are better options available to you. Do your research, uninstall this crap, download and install your own software updates on a regular basis from the manufacturer's website, and then install only the software that you need and want. If you don't, this will continue to bog down your system.

7. After purchase, UPGRADE, UPGRADE, UPGRADE your base system software, and then continue to upgrade it

I continue to be amazed at the number of people who buy Windows-based PCs off the shelf and think that they are just going to work to their satisfaction. Remember, everything you buy has been preloaded or "ghosted" onto the hard disk drive of your PC with base software for the model that was created at some point within the past year. There is a "time-to-live" issue in connection with the release of your system.

Software updates for PCs, including OS patches, driver updates/patches for system hardware, are released on a daily basis. Your system's configuration is obsolete when you purchase it--even if you customized it directly from the PC manufacturer. Sometimes even the latest updates available on your PC manufacturer's website for your system's chipset base will still have bugs in them, as the manufacturer of the PC may not have the latest releases available from the chipset manufacturer. Even then, the manufacturer's updates may still have bugs in them, and you may have to go directly to the chipset manufacturer for these updates or wait to get your system to the point where the very latest releases of chipset drivers are stable.

Even if you've purchased an Apple system, make sure to use that Apple Software Update feature and keep up to date with the latest drivers and OS system upgrades.

8. After purchase, BURN-IN and test your system for a pre-determined time prior to using it in a professional performance environment

You need a stable system, with clean audio and/or video output for performance purposes. Do yourself a favor and commit to a 4-6 week testing period prior to using your new system in an environment that could cause embarrassment to you. PCs do not always or often work properly out-of-the-box. Using a new system in professional performance without serious testing first is an uneccessary and foolish risk. If your PC proves unstable during testing, continue to work until you've resolved all the problems getting the latest driver updates, etc., as well as typical industry tools, like memory tests, burn-in tests, etc., until you've narrowed down and eliminated the trouble. This can take time--commit to it.

And, if the above criteria, which are mostly for Windows-based PCs, are too cumbersome for you, get yourself an Apple system and minimize your headaches from the start.

pinned

Not trying to be rude Tim but I stopped reading when I noticed how “YOU” ranked computers. I beg to differ with you but I will not because I know it is based on my opinion and experiences with repairing computers as I am sure you and others have your opinions too.
I own a HP and a Toshiba and they pretty much have the same specs (inner guts). However the HP is out performing the Toshiba by far. Interesting thing is that HP technical support is fantastic. They even help me with things that are not covered. However called Toshiba directly for a warranty issue and I was getting the blow off. Yes I could repair it myself but why when it has a warranty?
My last thought is that up until the past year I would have to agree with you that Dell is awful on every issue. However I have found that Dell has added a lot of updates and patches to their website. They even have them for older computers dating back to about 1999 (not that I would recommend anyone use a computer that old for MixMeister).
So yes I now own a Dell I rebuilt and it works wonderful with MixMeister as well as all the other music products. At least Dell gives you a CD so you can re-format your computer when you want to. That said I am still an HP lover… It has never crashed.

Now don’t get all upset here. I am not bashing nor do I want to be like those who do… I simply want to point out that a computer choice is up to the needs of the buyer and not the choice of the seller.

Banter

No, no offense taken whatsoever. The reality of PC purchase is complicated, and you may find a vast range of performance throughout even one given manufacturer's product line. I place HP/Compaq in the middle of the spectrum because of troubles with the HP/Compaq merger a few years back. Since that time they've had difficulty unifying their support structure to service both company's machines. To this day, it can be difficult to find certain drivers for their chipsets on certain machines from the merger era. However, driver issues with HPs lately have been exacerbated with the release of Vista, where they just don't have XP drivers available for some of their systems, even when people find they need to revert because of a system that really is too underpowered to run Vista (subject of a class action lawsuit involving Microsoft at the moment). Responses from HP have been, "Sorry, just deal with it." Usually you can get these machines to run XP, but you have to go hunting for the proper drivers for the chipset on the individual chipset manufacturer's website. If you stick with Vista on them, the performance is so miserable as to often make you want to chuck the system out-the-window.

Toshiba's customer service has generally been quite good in the past, although that may have changed recently. They've consistently had high rankings by all major reviewers for both service and quality for past half dozen years or so. I've not heard a lot about extensive troubles with Toshibas or Toshiba service. However, if you have trouble with call-in support anywhere, you almost always need to escalate yourself to a supervisor often via repeated bitching. The first person you speak with on the phone is an unsophisticated person behind a terminal spouting canned gibberish off a computer terminal. Toshiba also has numerous authorized drop-off repair centers that can also be most helpful.

Dell, on the other hand, has absolutely not kept up with their packaged driver releases for their newest products within the past year, particularly with respect to the release of new Vista and XP drivers for their hardware, in light of the push to Vista. If you investigate driver availabilities on their support sites for their chipsets, they are universally behind in getting their own packaged versions of these out to the public by as many as five releases. For example, for video, nVidia may have released 5 updated drivers since the last packaged version of the driver that Dell has made available to its customer base. Furthermore, Dell's driver installation process often prevents you from easily installing the latest chipset driver via the chipset manufacturer's install executable (a dell system won't let you install it via the executable as it has not been "tested" yet by them for integration to their particular machine), requiring you to extract the driver manually from the chipset manufacturer's executable and then installing it direct to the Windows System32 directory via the "Update Driver" option in the Control Panel to get the latest update into your system. This makes the tasks of getting stable updates quickly and easily into a Dell system difficult for the average computer user.

Furthermore, Dell systems released in the past few years have had significant hardware repair issues and failures--from motherboards, to disk drives, etc. I make most of my system repair money on repairing Dell systems still under warranty. Dell's re-installation procedures often do not provide full support for all the required drivers necessary to get the system back to a standard running state. In some systems, they've not even included disks for their network controllers, requiring you to download and install these separately just to get the network interfaces to function. Obviously, if you're trying to re-install your OS from scratch on a Dell due to some failure of the disk, et.al., the lack of NIC driver packaging makes it impossible for the single computer user to get on the internet to get the NIC driver in the first place, preventing them from getting all the drivers necessary to run their system. The re-install process for Dells is the weakest link of any manufacturer I've encountered all my years of business. The complaints I hear about Dell systems today are the worst of any manufacturer, hands-down, and this has affected their bottom-line conspicuously. Currently their stock is tanked and they are continuing to lose money. That is a bad sign for them, and should be taken as a serious warning by anyone considering their products.

Again, as advanced users, many of us are able to overcome these difficulties, but for someone with these types of troubles that just wants a computer that works, these sorts of issues make their lives frustrating.

Basically, buying a standard over-the-counter x86 PC these days is a risk, particularly during this time of Vista vs. XP transition, and finding a good one requires research and care. However, you are correct about HP. You can absolutely find good quality within their line of products. Just do your research because, to be honest, you can get a "lemon" from anyone.

The admonition to buy Apple, however is not easily controverted (and this comes from a died-in-the-wool x86 PC afficionado).

Thanks!

Ok, Ok, LOL! :]
This time I am in much more sync with you on this one Tim.

The HP Compaq thing really made me question the company’s logic. Why they just didn’t keep the name HP going on and allow Compaq to be buried is beyond me. For those who thought Compaq was already dead and did not know HP was still supporting Compaq must be asking what it is all about. Personally I have had no problems formatting of finding drivers on-line but for the average person it could be a nightmare. Also, from what HP has told me, Compaq is supposed to be their lower end now. Ok, so they get rid of the $499.99 desktop by HP and replace it with the $499.99 desktop by Compaq. LOL!

Toshiba, Well that one I have dealt with first hand quit a few times in the last year. For some reason “Last Year” I needed to repair a lot of computer that were hit with viruses that completely infected everything right to the bios. None of the computers would go past the manufactures screen which means windows would not load. Now I would say 15 out of 20 I was able to reformat by using a CD called DBAN Boot Media. Basically it starts from the CD and clears everything to Zeros then when it is done it asks for the format CD. To make this short, Toshiba was the only computer (laptop or desktop) that would not comply. So I called Toshiba and they Stunk! I do not have to tell you Tim that I did go through the channels. It sounds like we do the same thing when it comes to repairs. So for now, all five of these computers sit here waiting for some new way to come along so they can be formatted. BTW three were still under warranty and it has been six months waiting for Toshiba to get back on what they are going to do.

As for Dell, I will give you that!
Well I said I felt they were much easier to work with, I meant the computers. I remember Dell being terrible with customer service and I never gave them a thought when it came to calling them ever again. Not even when they admitted two years ago that they had a bad rap for customer service and said they were going to clean up their act. From all I hear they have not changed a thing. However I truly feel it is much easier to reformat a dell than it ever was. And the drivers are right there. All you need to do is type in a Model No# or Tag No# that is on the side or bottom of the computer. From there it askes you the system you are running. I have taken current Win XP computers and loaded them with Win 98 just to see if the drivers were there. Now I have not done this to all the dells I worked on, just a few I did not think the drivers would be there for but to my surprise they were. I do not know if you are using this Dell page but I am sure you are if you repair enough Dells but here is the address for your records or anyone else who wants it:
http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/index.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

I also agree with you Tim, if one does enough homework they can find a good computer but as you mentioned above, I would also recommend that a person calls the sale department of whatever company you want to purchase your computer from. I never purchase from a store. Go direct to HP, Toshiba, Dell or whoever you choose. Tim also mentioned that you get what you pay for. This is true. If you want a good laptop or desktop to run MixMeister you should plan to spend a minimum of $700.00 however you can find closeouts as low as $400.00 or high ends as much as $2,000.00.
So before you buy make sure you look with your Ears and Eyes!

Thanks for going easy on me Tim
Banter

You bring up a very good point with Toshibas. Sounds like the service has slipped in the last year or so. I would defer to your recent experience most definitely, and I feel your pain. These things are always in flux, and these a-hole PC manufacturers just continuously screw the public over and over again. It's hard to make recommendations when the quality often changes overnight.

Dell's, well they are behind in their driver releases, and that causes trouble from the stability perspective, especially with respect to sound issues and Mixmeister usage with already finicky Pro-ASIO cards. Dell's video drivers are so far behind in their packaged releases--shameful. Faulty video drivers are prime culprits in audio performance problems, followed by out-of-date or faulty disk drive controller drivers.

However, I would not buy a sub-$1000 laptop for professional audio performance. In fact, I wouldn't use a laptop at all ever--preferring to build a dual or quad core Opteron system with up to multiple processors in a half size 1U server case, lightweight that can be easily carried to venues in a very small gig bag, also insertable into standard racks. You can start with one quad or dual core processor in this system and expand as time goes on, with gigabytes and gigabytes of memory--having a truly professional audio computer system that will last you for years into the future.

As much as DJs are crazed to refer to themselves as "laptop" DJs, laptops NEVER outperform a well-built system with a top-of-the-line motherboard like this TYAN

http://www.tyan.com/product_board_detail.aspx?pid=599

that fits in a 1u case. Laptop boards cram everything into microchannel architecture for the their circuitry and this just plain cuts down on their overall performance. With powerful processors and controllers, laptop motherboards have essentially "clogged-up plumbing" that don't allow the fastest of processors, controllers and chips to make use of their own internal power specs. Get a slim-designed 1u server case system, stick it in a bag and carry it to your gig 'cause it won't weigh much more than a laptop anyway. It's not like you have to carry a half dozen boxes of vinyl around these days, right???

It's supposedly "COOL" to be a laptop DJ. So frackin' what? Are you a professional musician or just someone with a laptop in backpack? If you want complete and utter convenience to the exception of all else, do get some pre-packaged piece of something that may or may not work right, or do your homework and find a PC built with audio and high-performance processing power in mind. However, let me tell you, when you pull out your 1U lightweight, portable, professional audio, rack-mountable workstation for use at your gig, your promoter is going to think "Wow, this guy means business!"

The standard laptops and off-the-shelf PC's that the mainstream vendors are selling are NOT professional music studio workstations, period. They are designed for a mass market of the average user to browse the internet, send e-mail and watch Youtube videos. Someday Numark (hint, hint) or some other audio specialist might just figure this out and start building compact portable high-end computer systems with powerful processors and high-end audio chips like Deltas, etc., perhaps partnering with one of the main manufacturer's of PCs just to build and design such a specialized systems guaranteed to work with the most demanding of audio needs. Systems with expandable CPU and memory capacities that will serve the studio and portable DJ professional well and for many years via a single purchase (a system built on the TYAN board above would be just such a system). But, for now, we've got a giant canyon between the types of PCs that we need to have that are suitable and stable for quality audio production.

Crappy computers just tick me off.

And, Banter, by the way, it's great for you to be pushing out your perspective here. Glad to have someone add to this information. We need you to continue with your informative understanding of these issues too. It allows further commentary between both of us. The more technical expertise and perspective we can add to these sorts of issues, the better.

People need to have as much information as possible when making these considerations. We live in a world of marketing hype for technical products, overly deceiving to the general public.

For all of you who haven't got the complete picture here yet-- PCs just don't work right much of the time. Don't expect that when you buy one it will. Do your research. Ask questions here about components. We do have the expertise to help you out in these matters.

P.S. And a warning. Everyon should not all get discouraged by all the above complicated chat. At this juncture, in this post, this discussion has moved way into highest end of computer specs. Unless you're a pro musician and heavily serious about your craft, don't get too excited about the the "extreme" performance pro audio computer system. But, still do your research on whatever system you buy nonetheless.

Thanks!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: tepmix,

Well Tim I have got to tell you,
It may have been something I read of your some time ago about laptops and “Why wouldn’t a DJ bring a desktop to a gig vs a Laptop” and it was written in part of others not understanding you and I trying to explain that the more you do with your laptop the more you are asking for a crash because it simply can not keep up with the power a desktop can give you.

Now call me someone who strives for protection but I decided shortly after that post that you question needs to be thought over in a DJ’s mind. I ask it this way, “Why would a DJ choose a laptop over a desktop when the chance of crashing because you want to use more power than a laptop can give you”? With that I talked myself right into switching everything over to a desktop. LOL, I have not settled on the laptop I want to use yet but I know everything will fit into one case I am building. Like you said Tim, we used to bring ten times that amount in vinyl at one time. I would like to go with 1U Server Case with the Tyan but that is a little out of my market right now. I do shows for charity. I have a disability and it is my way of giving back from all those years I made good change. Plus I just purchased two JBL Eon 15 G2 and that set me back a little, however I will not be renting them anymore.

To touch on what Tim mentioned about getting scared off by our conversation here. Yes, we are speaking at the top level however if anyone ever has a question on this matter or any matter feel free to jump in on any post at any time you have a question. There is a lot to be learned from Tim, myself or even better yet, the questions of those who need help or direction can lead to things we can all benefit from.

Banter

Thanks for being supportive and educational Tim, it is well appreciative!

Good stuff here throughout this entire discussion thread--getting everything out into the greater Mixmeister community. As much as possible, the entire Mixmeister community neads to empower itself with this knowledge about PC performance architecture. The latest Fusion/Studio line of product IS a powerful and very professional audio application, significantly advanced over the predecessor MM line of product. The new Fusion/Studio line makes significant use of recent advancements in powerful processor designs--particularly helpful are dual and quad core processors, including multiples of these in systems where you've got the money to spend it. Combined with a high quality ASIO-enabled professional audio card (I'm a fan of the M-Audio Delta line of cards myself), the performance and sound production of MM Fusion/Studio in a well-designed, powerful and stable system can be spectacular.

Banter mentions the high cost of building a system with a top-of-the-line Tyan board in slim 1U server case, and yes, this can be an expensive system. If you build a system with that particular board, 2 Opteron dual-core processors, an M-Audio Delta sound card, 2 mirrored disk drives (500 gigabytes each with a total capacity of 500 gig mirrored for redundancy), the cost for such an ideal, portable pro-audio workstation would be as follows. I've changed the motherboard spec slightly--this one is a bit more practical for assembly because of the variety of PCI slots:

1 Tyan Thunder n3600B (S2927G2NR-E) motherboard
2-Opteron 2216 dual-core processor (total of 9.6Ghz of processing power)
2-500GB Western Digital Enterprise Sata II Disk drives, model WD5001ABYS (mirrored--500 GB total capacity)
4-2 GB DDR2 667 MHZ, registered, ECC (error correcting) memory modules (total 8GB memory, configured dual-inline)
1-M-Audio 1010LT Delta Pro-Audio Standard PCI card (10 separate audio channels or 5 stereo pairs with Digital I/O and software mixer)
1U C Rackmount Chassis, ATX Style w/ 400W EPS 24+8 Universal Power Supply
1U side mount standard PCI Riser Card 33MHz 32bit (to side mount the standard M-audio PCI interface to fit in slim 1U-case)
2-1U heatsink/cooling fans for Opteron Processors

Parts Cost for system above as follows:

$300 (Tyan Motherboard)
$500 (Two 2216 Opteron Processors, 4 processing cores)
$210 (Two Western Digital WD5001ABYS SATA II 500GB Enterprise class drives)
$280 (Four-STT DDR2-400 2GB/128X4 ECC/REG Memory-SuperTalent/Hynix--8GB total)
$200 (M-Audio Delta 1010LT Pro-audio card)
$160 (1U C Rackmount Chassis, ATX Style w/ 400W EPS 24+8 Universal Power Supply)
$ 5 (PCI sidemount riser card)
$ 55 (Two Thermaltake 1U heatsink/fans for opteron 2000 (1207pin) processors

Total Cost (Parts) = $1,710

If you are professional musician and want a portable truly professional studio workstation, this is the kind of system you should be demanding for your work. It is important to note that the above system has been fully specified with two dual-core processors. You don't have to start out with two processors in this system. To begin, you can start with one dual-core opteron 2200 in just one of the processor slots. Each processor must be have separate dual-inline memory configuration for optimal performance, so you can reduce total memory (without the extra processor by 4GB), thereby starting with a single dual-core processor system with 4GB total memory. This system would still provide 4.8GHZ total processor power and the 4GB of ram would also be plenty.

You can build a system like this on your own if you are technically inclined or find a professional to build one for you (which may upt to triple the price for pre-configured system). Also, the system above doesn't include the cost of the Windows OS. At this juncture, you would be best still going with an OEM edition of Windows XP Pro (available for purchase through December 31 of this year). In multiprocessor mode, XP Pro will support up to two processors with two dual cores--so four cores total (as in the configured system above). It will support a maximum of two dual core processors (4 total cores). It will not support quad-core processors, as described following. Windows Home edition DOES NOT HAVE MULTIPROCESSOR CAPABILITY.

Future Expansion potential of above described Pro-audio Workstation:

Although the cost is high for a system of this nature, the above design will LAST YOU FOR YEARS. It is expandable in terms of processing power and memory, giving it a life expectation of 7, 10 or more years:

1. The Tyan Thunder motherboard specified above accepts all Opteron 2000 processors, including the Quad core editions that are still being released in faster and faster models. Currently, the fastest Opteron Quad core (2350 model) available contains four 2.0GHZ processing cores, which means that the total processing power of a single 2350 opteron processor is 8GHZ. With two of them in the above system, your total processing power can currently be expanded to a total 16GHZ of processing power. I would expect the core speed of the Opteron Quad processors to rise to at least 3.0GHZ or faster as newer models are released, meaning that ultimate processing power of the above machine can ultimately be expanded to 24GHZ power or more. Windows XP cannot run these QUAD cores, so moving forward, you will need to go to newer operating system. Vista Pro can handle this now, but don't do that yet. Wait until MS releases it's next OS, as, based on their typical OS release cycle, should be the stable version. And who knows, you might be able to run Mixmeister and other Pro-audio applications in Linux or another OS 5+ years down the road. The community edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux-- http://www.centos.org -- is free and is the exact same thing as the Red Hat released software. CentOS is fully supported on the system described above and will automatically recognize and install drivers of the above specified system upon installation.

2. The total memory capacity of the the Tyan Thunder board specified above is 32GB--16GB per processor, more memory than you can probably ever have need for in a pro-workstation of this nature for 10 years or so.

3. You can specify larger disk drives if you would like more onboard storage space. The Western Digital enterprise drives described above are currently available in up to 750GB capacities. That will increase as time goes on. I recommend these WD enterprise-class drives above any other manufactuers' drives. They have the highest MTBF (mean time between failure) rating, and they come with a 5 year replacement warranty. Furthermore, The Tyan motherboard above comes with on-board chipset RAID control for mirroring and the case chassis above with the motherboard can be setup for hot swapping of a failed drive in the mirrored array. This means that if one drive of your mirrored pair dies, you can pull it out and slip in another with zero downtime or data loss--even while in the middle of a live performance if you feel it is necessary. Furthermore, with Fast USB ports, additional portable USB drives can be carried with you to your performances.

In conclusion, if you are a serious professional musician with high expectations in a serious audio production workstation, one that is portable, this is the type of solution you should be looking for. In addition to MM Fusion/Studio, your other professional audio applications will be happy in this type of system as well, providing you a full range of products for use on your pro workstation. IF you're a Pro, forget the laptop. Your audience, your DJ peers, and any studio pros that you work with will see your commitment to your profession when you choose to go with a professional workstation of this nature.

Thanks!

P.S. One file note I neglected to mention. The above Tyan Thunder motherboard comes with a built-in Volari standard PCI VGA chipset and port for your video display. You do not need a separate video card. This is so very important in terms of quality audio production. Regular desktop motherboards are designed for the addition of the latest whizbang Video cards in PCI-E and Express models--these video cards are very new and most of them have notoriously unstable video drivers that can interfere with your audio production (choppy audio, popping, clicks, etc.). The PCI video display on this board is not designed for the gamer but for the pro who wants workstation stability. Using standard PCI video display, which has been a standard for many years now, and is very stable, is geared to minimize any audio interference by your VGA display.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: tepmix,

Ehy Tim, such an interesting thread to me.

Planning to go Pro and getting paid to play, the kind of hardware you bring with you makes a big difference.
Too bad I went to a pair of Audio Computer Shops and both gave me no chance on building a system on a 1U rackmount case.
It's true I've spent more or less half the price of your Tyan suggestion, but now I got a 3U monster that it's hard to move even from one room to the other.
Must say that it sound great and after hours of live multitrack and multieffect Fusion performance, it's still cold like shutted off.
Anyway we're still talking about a Windows system and even if Xp is very stable actually, I always got the feeling that something may go wrong in the worst of the situation.
For better portability and OS trusting, I'm testing MM for Mac on a MacBook Pro, but Mac's release of Fusion still has some issue.My dream system when finally MM for Mac will match Win version will be a Mac Xserve.

Keep on searching and share...

Luca

brilliant thread and one well worth reading by anyone thinking of buying a new laptop or pc. tim helped me out no end with my laptop - which is a dell, and is still causing massive problems (never buy dell!). i've been offline for a while but am hoping to get to the bottom of this sound-glitching when djing live problem.

Hello Tepmix and all, I just quit using Virtual DJ and just bought MM, I'm a pro Video DJ doing high end Weddings etc and need reliability. I have suffered for years with random crashes of VDJ. I fairness they are almost fixed but the beatmixing control of MM convinced me to change. also, the software just feels pro-grade and it doesnt feel like it will crash. I have read you posts and am pleased to see an open admission on post 31 that PCs are difficult. While I feel my initial test have been very good on my high end gaming custom PC (quad core, 4gb, 2 x 500gb 7200 raid drive, 640 video nvidia, vista) I'm considering starting over either with XP or buying an apple. Which apple is best ?