MadManDan wrote:I am on a tight budget and am about to finance a daw. My objective is to set it up stable as possible and keep it as many years as I can.
Either you are using finance, or you are on a tight budget. Paying finance companies is the precise opposite of tightening your budget. There are plenty of good, used Apples and PCs out there that are more than capable of running a DAW. I am running 96 tracks on a five-year-old Acer that cost $400 new.
You do not have to pay through the nose for some brand PC, just because it is endorsed by your fav. DAW maker. I bet you go down to the store and get brand-X washing powder and ignore the sticker on your washing machine that tells you (on pain of death) that only brand-Y will do! The same applies to DAWs.
Then we have these two statements -
MadManDan wrote:I am on a tight budget.
In my world, those two statements are in direct conflict with one another. There used to be a very good reason for running PT and that was because either (a) you are working in a multi-user environment and everybody else is using PT and you need to exchange material several times a day, or (b) you are a facility owner and PT is what the customer asks for.MadManDan wrote:I have protools 12 and will only buy an Avid approved laptop.
If you are one of the above, fine and carry on (and carrion as well) with PT. If not, Reaper will be far more stable and can do far more, especially in video post-production. It also allows you to use a much less powerful PC or Mac.
Even if you stick with PT, it pays to download Reaper, so that you can perform certain tasks quicker and in some cases better. (It may also pay to have a back-up DAW that you know well, as the future of Avid is very uncertain and the pay-as-you-go customers may easily find themselves without a DAW from one day to the next.)
But now we come to Windows v. Mac - domestic Windows is to be avoided! We have both Macs and PCs here and (quite apart from the fact that I hate both systems!) Windows Pro is worth the little extra. I do love the old Apple keyboards from 15 years ago and sadly the new ones are nowhere nearly as good! I am using one right now with my old Acer laptop and it just is the best. However the Apple OS seems a bit too Mickey Mouse to me, as I need to know where things are and not move little toy symbols around.
Let's be quite clear about this - HP do not make laptops! What they do is to specify and badge laptops. The same applies to most 'Made in China' budget products, from mixing desks to computers. If you spec-up a computer to the same standard as the HP (screen, , you will get a very similar product.MadManDan wrote:the only Avid specified pc laptop, an hp z book g2.
However - if you are 100% stuck on PT, the Gold Standard is a Mac and not a PC, approved or otherwise! PT can cause all kinds of silly problems on a PC that just do not appear on a clean, stripped-out Mac. Even a 'dirty' Mac (i.e. one that has had all kinds of dufus software loaded all over its drives) that is also running PT in our place has never fallen over. There are all kinds of really good used Macs all over the Interweb and if you can come to terms with the Toys-R-Us OS, that (and not a PC) will run PT without any danger of getting a nose-bleed!