You are right. But time is running and this flexibility for many of us would be the only reason to buy a new workstation. Let’s see…
I went to my 1st rehearsal in 11 months last night. I was ready to go…everything tested. Everything was lit up, but no keyboards. In a panic, I remembered I foolishly did a Windows update on Christmas, which defaulted all my settings. So, I pulled up power management, and reset my USB power settings. Windows was putting the ports to sleep. Apparently, I had forgotten to address them earlier. Other than that, had a great rehearsal, no other problems. This reminded me of long past, failed, workstation updates. My workstation died when an update was applied. I was without it for weeks as it was being “repaired”. Thus my distrust of key manufacturers installing a computer as you mentioned. They would muck it up for sure. 
LOL, can’t tell you how many times I’ve been burned by this be it music or my former career designing business software… You might also want to recheck all of your privacy settings if that sort of thing matters to you, they seem to magically change to the “let MS clone my entire machine and snoop my every move” setting after “updates”, lol.
I have. I updated because a certain program required it. When I did, EVERYTHING went haywire. Lost much of my licensing, new apps, and notifications from hell. Still trying to stop notifications from Defender…not responding to notification “off”. But, got all my Cantabile setups back. Anything in the future will have to run on what I have, or I won’t purchase it. 
Are you using a disk imaging backup system? That has saved my rear a couple of times. Much of the licensing gets trashed, but at least I had a reliable disk image to restore to a previous state. I’m using the Paragon freebie for this, works well imo.
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No…but I need to. Thanks for the info.
You can get a lot of laptop for $800 these days. Getting one of these for my daughter
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08D69XNG1/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
- 8 cores, touch/pen screen, swappable SSD and memory for $700. 14 inch though.
I’d steal it from her but she’s our family’s budding artist. She’ll have twice as many cores as anyone else in the family. Not jealous. Really. Do I look green?
Hi. I had a quick look at the link on Amazon but there are no Asus Vivobook flips available until the end of February. I too am looking for a hybrid laptop for my live work. I use MIDI pickup for VST instruments but the real challenge is to get a guitar FX VST that has low enough latency. I am wondering who to ask.
Hi anointed,
Which USB audio interface are you using? I’m playing into AmpliTube 5 at 64 buffers into a Behringer UMC202HD on an 8 year old Lenovo X230 and it plays fine. I could probably get away with 32 buffers but haven’t needed to.
I have a Surface pro 6 recently upgraded from a surface pro 3. I use the built in audio because there is only one usb port which I use for Midi dongle. Also I do live work outdoors so everything has to be battery powered. Following Brad’s advice I switch network off and anti-virus off but with heavy VSTs like Helix Native it is struggling.
After some time with Surfaces, I have to say that it takes a bit of effort to get it to play nice with real-time audio. Here’s a good source of tweaks:
I would definitely recommend to get a decent USB audio interface - the on-board audio is not something to write home about; also you will get better low-latency performance from a decent audio interface. You can get a simple and sleek 2-port USB hub very cheap, so having only one USB port is not an issue. Also, there are a number of bus-powered interface options, so running on battery-power is not a problem per se.
But - and here comes is a huge BUT when it comes to running battery-powered: most laptops absolutely refuse to give optimum performance when they are battery-powered, even if you max out the power scheme. It’s just something that’s built in very deep inside. I’ve optimized the h*** out of my laptops, but I still get all kinds of issues when running them on battery only. I can’t really recommend running live audio on battery - you will not get the full performance out of it and will in all likelihood run into all kinds of issues. Just don’t do it…
Still, having a laptop with a battery is nice on any live gig, since it doesn’t crash when the power goes off…
There are some adventurers who have used car or truck batteries and power converter units to power audio equipment “in the wild”, so that might be an approach, but it’s a bit extreme 
Cheers,
Torsten
Hey thanks for your reply. we’ve started using Mobility scooter batteries with inverters to power the PA speakers. The problem I had with usb sound cards was the connectors which proved very unreliable maybe I need to spend a bit on professional ones. The WASAPI drivers are certainly better than the ASIO4ALL ones. I think I watched this video before, it helped get the Realtek drivers sussed. I’ll watch it again. Cheers.
Those sold out quick! Sorry! Screen is just a little on the dark side for sensitive color work, but otherwise, they’re pretty nice (we now have a four core and an eight core - side effects of online schooling).
Re laptops and batteries, there must be some type of UPS that one could use on a gig, that doesn’t screech when the power goes out, no? I know I wouldn’t recommend mine, though 
Just 30 minutes ago I remembered that I have an Intel NUC under my TV. It is used as Roon server for my hi-fi, with external DAC.
For home theater that little beast is quite performant, an i7 with 8 giga Ram and a very small SSD.
After another two nights fight with my bloody gaming notebook I tried to run LatencyMon on the NUC.
Surprise: it seems a perfect machine for ASIO and audio production!
So I am thinking to sell the notebook and build my Cantabile system on a new NUC.
It seems that no battery, pure Intel hardware and integrated graphics allow a serious system latency performance.
Any experience here?
There are several threads on NUC’s. Just do a search on the forum. Here is one:
Just note that at the heart of NUCs there is still laptop technology - the Intel NUC specification is based on laptop processors. I guess that (since they don’t have batteries) NUCs are less affected by funky battery-saving antics, but you should really check the specific device.
If you’re willing to go down the route of a small-form-factor PC with separate screen (I’d recommend a touch screen), take a look at an alternative: I built my live cube based on the ASRock DeskMini platform with a desktop i5 - it cost me (if I recall correctly) less than 800 EUR and performs great! The DeskMini platform is just a small box (1.92 liters, 155x155x80 mm), runs quietly and cool (typical CPU temperature when running Cantabile live around 56 °C) and costs around 150 EUR without CPU/RAM/SSD.
Best setup i’ve had so far.
Cheers,
Torsten
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I am checking this chance too.
I am now in favour of NUC because I got one for my home theater, and every test I am making gives extremely good results
I was in the same boat as you about 8 months ago, looking for a new music laptop. It needed to do double duty, be my primary gig rig, and my studio computer. I wanted to build a pretty robust machine with at least 32 gig RAM and a very fast single core performance of at least 3.6. and I knew I wanted to pair it with the new PreSonus Quantum 2626 interface, so I needed thunderbolt.
But I couldn’t find any pre-built laptops that would meet my criteria. Torsten’s posts were particularly helpful, and I started looking at NUC’s and small form options. I didn’t have the time or the inclination to build it, although it looks relatively easy, so I ended up having a rack PC built by one of the small audio PC boutique shops.
That solution certainly isn’t for everyone, but it’s worked out pretty well for me. I had far more choices in all the components… The exact processor I wanted, cooling, RAM, etc. Plus I was able to get native thunderbolt and firewire, along with USB. And when it comes time to upgrade components, it will be a breeze to swap them out and upgrade the unit. And more cost-effective than replacing the entire laptop.
Those three factors alone drove most of my decision. It definitely cost more in the end, and required a separate monitor (GeChic 11" touchscreen) but it was more than worth it for me. If I had built it myself I probably could have done it for around 1000- 1200… maybe less.
I’m a guitar player and sax player, so I really love the rack setup. It’s just a 6U rack, holding the PC, the quantum, my wireless receiver, and a clean power supply. It’s on the floor or a table out of the way, and I have a very clean gigging footprint with just a little touch screen monitor on my mic stand. Bring it home from a gig and set it on my studio table, plug it in and I’m good to go.
The one downside is that after I made this rig, I realized that it is not as good as a laptop if you are flying very often. To fly I’ll need to pull the PC and quantum from the rack and carry them on. A laptop would definitely be easier, but I don’t mind the extra hassle, given the benefits.
Anyway, food for thought. A rack may not be best for you, and after gigging with a laptop and Cantabile for several years I do also see the advantages of a laptop.
Best of luck in your search!
Tom
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True. Laptop “U” family processors are installed in NUC, but they are both power and frequency boosted. Typically, the 15W processor runs up to 30W, so it’s not really a laptop configuration. A very tricky, full of features BIOS, helps achievement of a very stable behavior.
Like Furio, my NUC is mainly used as video and audio center. I never though to use this NUC for VSTs work, 8GB DDR4-2400 RAM and 256GB M.2 SATA SSD are not bad, not enough powerful system for live audio.
Being curious, I’m running right now LatencyMon (v7.0) while watching a movie, sending an audio stream to another PC (via VLC), and writing this post. Audio interface is my old M-Audio Audiophile USB, bought in 2004 (with its not-very-stable windows 7 ASIO drivers, the latest released). And there is not any optimization, balanced power plan active. Only the WiFi adapter is currently disabled, due my preference for LAN connection. As you can see, result of LatencyMon is good.
I suppose that an i7-based NUC, or a mini-PC with a desktop processor might be a good solution.
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