Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Need advice on macbook!...please.

R

ReadingAid

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 16, 2007
3
0
Hey everyone new to these forums and i have a bit of a query involving my new macbook. Its an odd situation but i have just come out of a audio and music technology course and i have also been producing sort of freelance for 3 years whilst doing my course and i have gained some knoledge but one area i havent really researched and that is the macbook requirements i need.

I am now starting a course at "Alchemea" and i recieve a free macbook 2.0Ghz with 1 gig of ram and a 80 gig hardrive. obviously the space is an issue and i will be getting an external seagate drive but what about the specs are they enough for what i want to do which is; audio recording and editing in "pro tools" and logic pro 7. i will be running many tracks on each program and i will be looking to add opther applications over time including Reason and Live. Primearily i want to make sure my prgrams run smoothely and with many plug ins as possible as i am an avid producer of all types of music.

The main questions i pose are:

1. Should i simply upgrade the RAM in the one i recieve and get a external hard-drive.

2. Or should i sell the lower spec mac off for roughly £650 and simply pay the idfference on a higher spec model?

Really i would prefer to do option one but let me know what you guys think, thanks alot for your help, any would be appreciated.
 
Should be fine with more RAM, although if I were you I'd pop in a larger internal drive, they are pretty cheap and easy to install (250Gb 5400 rpm is about $215). The one thing that is lacking is a FW800 port as if your going tto be running alot of data from an external drive it really wants to be as fast as possible to cope with demands of samplers and audio recording/playback.

If these upgrades start to get significantly expensive then moving straight to a MACbook Pro would seem sensible....
 
ah brilliant, yeah i see what you mean with the firewire issues, havent really thought about that before, your upgrade advice sounds like a good idea to me.
 
digi is still recommending fw400. you're fine w/ the internal drive, because you'll be writing all your data to an external drive. get one w/ at least 8 meg cache and 7200 rpm min.

yes, up the RAM to as much as you can afford. but everything else is fine, imho.
 
isnt the maximum RAM i can have only 2GB though, i say "only" because it sounds like your saying its limitless?.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back