Thinking of buying son one to take back to France.

Will "•Intel Atom dual core N2600.
•Processor speed 1.6GHz.
•1GB DDR3 RAM.
•320GB SATA hard drive."
Run Reaper/ Audacity and a Beringer UCA 202 do you all think?

Dave.

I've run Audacity on my Acer Aspire One ZG5 and not had any problems. That was on a minimal Linux OS though (Crunchbang) - if you use a more heavyweight OS you might have issues with the amount of free memory you have to run programs.

Thanks Garry,
The music is not a dealbreaker, he needs something for the internet. I am not forking out £400 for a good laptop because..
1) heavy and big to lug (no car)
2) Flakey musician type is Son. The PC will be lost, stolen or broken within a six month.
Thinking about things though? I ran Samplitude SE8, two tracks recording on an 850MHz HP compaq with 1/2G of ram and that was XP PRO!

Dave.

Shouldn't have much of a problem running XP - just make sure you get rid of all the crap. 7 is likely to be a slow-motion disaster.

If you're not too bothered about reaper then I'd say definitely go for a lightweight Linux distro. Audacity is available on all of them. The Behringer is generally reported to work without issues. The only downside I know of is that hibernate often doesn't work under Linux.

I've not used it for a while, but Ubuntu-studio may be a workable option. It's free, so no loss if it doesn't work out. It's also pretty much a point-and-click install.

Whatever OS you use, I'd recommend a copy of VLC which will handle just about any video or audio format you can throw at it.

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It wasn't me!
(Well, actually, it probably was)

The Good Lady Wife has an Asus eeepc seashell series with w7 starter edition on which I've installed Reaper for various little projects. I don't think I've had any more than 5 or 6 tracks with stock VSTs at any one time. Reaper runs flawlessly. Render are a bit slow but that's about it.

Audacity is, of course lovely but I stopped using it because I found it's file format a bit big and it doesn't do anything I can't do quicker in Reaper.

For a media player I like Gom player because I can set up my keyboard shortcuts the same as other programmes.

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Ohm's Law states, "Your PA isn't as powerful as you think it is".

Thanks Will but it has got to be XP I think.
He has used XP for 7 years and I don't think he would want to try to master another OS (neither of us like W7 TBH!)

Dave.

Quote shufflebeat:

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The Good Lady Wife has an Asus eeepc seashell series with w7 starter edition on which I've installed Reaper for various little projects. I don't think I've had any more than 5 or 6 tracks with stock VSTs at any one time. Reaper runs flawlessly. Render are a bit slow but that's about it.

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That's encouraging shuffs! I know Reaper will run from a usb stick. Can anyone tell me if there is any performance advantage in doing that?

In fact the perfect DAW for him would probably be Samplitude Silver. He uses Sam SE8 a lot at home. Silver is limited to 8 tracks so I would guess the resource hit is quite low? The built in MP3 converter and easy Cloud access would also be useful. (wonder if that will run off a stick?)

Dave.

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I know Reaper will run from a usb stick. Can anyone tell me if there is any performance advantage in doing that?

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I did experiment with that when I was young and foolish and it ran fine but I found my own flow interrupted by things not being all in the one place.

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Ohm's Law states, "Your PA isn't as powerful as you think it is".

Hmm, I have just run the 8 demo tracks in Sam Silver and it is pulling 150k of memory (of 2G) and 20% of a 3.0G P4 processor. I think the demo has some pluggins running as well?

By my crude arithmetic, 4 tracks should be within a notepads grasp?

Dave.

Shouldn't be too bad as long as you're not expecting great things. The notebook being used to write this is a Samsung N150 with an Intel Atom 1.50GHz, 2GB RAM and running W7. Almost same experience as shufflebeat - Reaper runs flawlessly from an HD install but only seems to handle a handful of audio tracks and stock plugins (JS or VST) before it starts to strain - this is using ASIO4ALL drivers. No experience joined up with an external soundcard but should be fine with recording, especially if you're limited to 2 tracks at a time.

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www.loadedaudio.com - Audio Mastering and home of the Mix Fix
www.audioslap.com - Audio News, Reviews and Interviews

Very interesting that W7 runs OK. I wonder if the reports I was reading were referring to a pre-release version (not that I'd use it anyway).

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It wasn't me!
(Well, actually, it probably was)

Quote ef37a:

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Thanks Will but it has got to be XP I think.
He has used XP for 7 years and I don't think he would want to try to master another OS (neither of us like W7 TBH!)

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Keep in mind most netbooks were released after XP was discontinued so your going to have to be careful regarding finding a new unit with XP driver support as I doubt the are all that many on the market. Make sure you do some reading up on any model that catches your eye in those regards before buying.

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ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

Quote Pete Kaine:

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Quote ef37a:

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Thanks Will but it has got to be XP I think.
He has used XP for 7 years and I don't think he would want to try to master another OS (neither of us like W7 TBH!)

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Keep in mind most netbooks were released after XP was discontinued so your going to have to be careful regarding finding a new unit with XP driver support as I doubt the are all that many on the market. Make sure you do some reading up on any model that catches your eye in those regards before buying.

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Again! Thanks Pete.
We do USE W7, just that we find it a PITA in that it does not do things as XP did. Why for instance did they have to completely re vamp the sound setup process? Just general niggerly things like that, inertia and bone bloody idleness!

Dave.

Be aware that prior to Windows 8, a Netbook wasn't classed as such unless it had 2Gb RAM or LESS, so many can't be upgraded past that.

A Windows 8 netbook however can usually be upgraded much more, and usually has a far better CPU and GPU. Even if you're just putting XP on, that will make a big difference. So will a cheap SSD to boost drive performance.

Quote ef37a:

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Just general niggerly things like that, inertia and bone bloody idleness!

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Quote GaryM:

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Quote ef37a:

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Just general niggerly things like that, inertia and bone bloody idleness!

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I'm sure this is a typo for niggly.

Andy

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When the going gets weird, the Weird turn Pro.

Quote zenguitar:

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Quote GaryM:

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Quote ef37a:

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Just general niggerly things like that, inertia and bone bloody idleness!

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I'm sure this is a typo for niggly.

Andy

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Show wos bro!

Thanks to all who helped. Nobody came back and said B stupid idea the thing will crash and crackle all ways up to Sunday!

I would LOVE to get him better, like my HP i3 w7/64 with 4G ram and a Ka6 but I just know it will not last long!

Dave.

Quote ef37a:

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By my crude arithmetic, 4 tracks should be within a notepads grasp?

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I was getting 6 tracks (well 3 stereo tracks) on a 40MHz 386 and 16 tracks on a 200MHz Pentium so well written software should give you oodles of tracks on a 1GHz processor.

James.

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JRP Music - Audio Mastering and Restoration.
http://www.jrpmusic.net

Well thanks all, in the end I bought an S/H HP Compaq 510. The netbook was £160 and the HP £199 and I had overlooked the fact that netties have no optical drive!

Seems a good tool. XP Home. Intel Pent'R 2.26G 2G ram. Seems pretty slick and the Tascam US122L went in like paint.
Spent all afternoon and evening trying to get the wireless link to work with no joy.
Print Screen does not work (didn't on an old HP Compaq I had?)Works if I use a usb kbd tho?

Clock did not seem to want to stay set but after setting it to Internet time today (via wire) it seems stable enough.

Cannot see any way to make a set of recovery discs (which I have always done) even tho' the .pdf user book says there is an HP app' for it.

There is some junk(?) on it called "Intel Graphics Accelerated Driver",icon on the taskbar

Still, I am very happy with it for the money and have fired off an email to the shop!

Dave.