Good laptop for Cantabile?

thinking about replacing my older Toshiba laptop with a “new” one. Came across this on ebay. For those of you in the know about laptops for Cantabile, would this be a good one? I see it’s using Windows 7, not 10.

Hi Lee,

I have 2 of these models with the i7 and one of them has the Quadro video card. It was a pain for audio because the video card required some digging around to find the DOS entry level codes for the Quadro card to correct it. If you can find ones with the ATI type card it dosen’t have this problem. ( I have 2 of these laptops, one with the Nvidia and 1 with the ATI). I still use both equally, I just wanted to warn you about the tricky video card, it can be corrected as noted and then works fine and is so powerful you can do desktop video editing with it. Also make sure it has the large 200W AC adapter as some have been sold with a smaller one that underpowers the unit. Other than that these tanks are very durable and heavy and for most people and if you wanted you could throw away the USB hub there are so many USB slots. I love mine. You might also see if they will put Win 10 on it by request (sometimes the vendors will give a choice).

Dave

This one has a i5-3360M 2.8GHz processor and the Quadro video card. Unless the update is pretty simple, I do not want to try to do any code updates. Also, do you think the i5 will be powerful enough?

Hey Lee,

I run a lot of hogs as some might call them, like Ivory, B5, Ravenscroft and algos like Diva. I had an i5 and it was too much for the dual core type i had running at 2.3 Ghz. I went to i7 Quad core and at least a 2.6 GhHz CPU. If you run less resource hungry plugins like Torsten and Terry have pointed to the i5 is plenty enough to do the trick. FWIW the Quadro problem was the Power Mizer feature. If you need help on it I have the literature on how to turn it off. It caused cpu spiking that made the audio pop and crackle.

Dave

Thanks Dave. I don’t run a resource intense setup so I’m guessing i5 would cover my needs

Any other members want to chime in about what I should look for in a refurbished laptop?

I found an i7 2.8Ghz machine with touchscreen and 12 Gb RAM for something like $280 because it had a few dents (it operates flawlessly). And I got a Dell that was actually faster than it with 16Gb RAM and an SSD for $150. It’s huge and weighs about 16 pounds with this huge freakin’ battery but it performs really well- I’d say look for big heavy machines maybe a year or two old that have great specs that people are willing to sell for less :wink: Unless you actually plan to carry it around in a backpack of course.

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and where did you find these great deals- online, word of mouth, brick and mortar…?

The first one was eBay ad the second one was local. Obviously there is an amount of trial, error and luck involved :wink: But usually between Craigslist and eBay deals do turn up.

Just pulled the trigger at Amazon for this laptop. Going to upgrade RAM and swap out the HD for my existing one (500gb SSD). Thanks @dave_dore for your help.

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I found a Surface Pro 4 with the i5, 8 GB ram and the 256 GB HD on eBay with some minor screen issues for $500. The screen issues don’t really impact Cantabile.

Sounds like a good deal. I’m very pleased with my HP Elitebook 8770. It was advertised as having 8gb of RAM but when I ran diagnostics I discovered that it actually has 16!

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Whoops!! :smiley: Nice!!!