PC Laptop in 2021? Recommendations

[Críoch]

I'm just about to return a Dell G7 gaming laptop.

Would greatly appreciate if people could recommend some laptops or share what they've bought recently.

Spec looked good for the G7. Overkill kick ass for home schooling / kids projects going into secondary. Also planned to have Ableton running for my young man.

All good, except Ableton & audio is a big fucking problem.

Spent the last few days trying to set it up. Headphone jack doesn't really work for Ableton (it's fine for all else).

When I do get it working, pulling the headphone plug out causes Ableton to crash haha. CPU with stock plugs is all over the place. Been drowning slowly in a sea of drivers & tweaking all sorts of settings. It's just not correct unfortunately & doubt it will be. I don't have time to get any deeper into it when it may never be right.

[Barfunkel]

Interesting, any idea what causes such behavior? I have a 7 year old Dell laptop that runs most projects I throw at it just fine. Only lately have I felt I need more CPU power, as my projects have been getting a tad too pompous. Seems really odd that basically any modern computer that costs more than pennies couldn't handle most DAW projects.

[Mslwte]

whats your budget? I just got a new Dell laptop for work. when i ran it past my boss he said it should be fine to run Ableton haha

https://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/dell-pr ... ersion.asp

[terryfalafel]

Yeah, sounds like there was something else going on with that laptop. It shouldn't have struggled with Ableton by the sound of it.

The last couple of laptops I've bought have been refurbs. I do not expect to ever buy a brand new laptop again now.

The one I'm typing on now is a Dell business model - i7 / 16GB ram / 512GB SSD - about 1800 EUR when it was new three years ago, and 550 EUR to me a couple of months ago. Professional refurb, almost perfect cosmetic condition. This machine should easily last 3 - 5 years if I look after it.

It's the same thing as buying a car new... if you want the 'new car smell' factor and cachet of driving it off the showroom floow, then fair play - buy new. But, it loses 1/3 of the value or more the second you drive it home for the first time.

To be blunt, I haven't got the money for that. And the savings when getting a refurb are so vast that the risk of getting a stinker is massively outweighed by the value for money getting a high spec excutive model for the same price as a new low > mid range machine.

[Críoch]

Interesting, any idea what causes such behavior? I have a 7 year old Dell laptop that runs most projects I throw at it just fine. Only lately have I felt I need more CPU power, as my projects have been getting a tad too pompous. Seems really odd that basically any modern computer that costs more than pennies couldn't handle most DAW projects.

I've spent the 3rd day with it now & think I have it mainly sorted. It was a journey.

I was struggling to get the extra graphics card working with ableton. 0% activity in task manager. I had it activated in the card graphics properties when you right click on the desktop background. However you need to have it activated in a 2nd place (have found this out a few times in Windows). This has improved things dramatically. No glitches or cpu spikes. No disk overloads.

Working great (I think) now with external soundcard.

There is a bit of knowledge required to tune things off the shelf. Must be frustrating for most people. I've read several threads about recent dell computers & the problems I've experienced. Calling support didn't help them. I didn't call them. Updating drivers & troubleshooting ain't worth a shit in my experience most of the time. I did all & made no difference. Nobody mentioned the approach that seems to have worked for me.

Yeah, this G7 is a pretty decent i7 & I expected to at least be able to plug in some headphones & check that Live was working. It couldn't cope. My older / much lower spec dell & Sony laptops (and macs) could all do that.

With this dell G7, I think it's a configuration problem. Power management paranoia & performance throttling to make the battery last longer. There is something majorly fucked with how the realtek drivers interact with Live. Soundcard required.

Gonna push it a bit tomorrow & see how she handles. Still not 100% about it staying.

[Críoch]

whats your budget? I just got a new Dell laptop for work. when i ran it past my boss he said it should be fine to run Ableton haha

https://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/dell-pr ... ersion.asp

I think it was close to 1500e. I decided to go with dell just to take the thought out of it. Figured a gaming laptop would be OK. I would have got another Scan I'd it hadn't of been for Brexit. Was looking at Clevo also, who looked great.. but I decided to be cowardly sheep instead of taking a risk. Scan would have been first choice.. so generally disappointed about that.

This is it: https://www.dell.com/en-ie/shop/gaming- ... op/cng7006

[Críoch]

Yeah, sounds like there was something else going on with that laptop. It shouldn't have struggled with Ableton by the sound of it.

The last couple of laptops I've bought have been refurbs. I do not expect to ever buy a brand new laptop again now.

The one I'm typing on now is a Dell business model - i7 / 16GB ram / 512GB SSD - about 1800 EUR when it was new three years ago, and 550 EUR to me a couple of months ago. Professional refurb, almost perfect cosmetic condition. This machine should easily last 3 - 5 years if I look after it.

It's the same thing as buying a car new... if you want the 'new car smell' factor and cachet of driving it off the showroom floow, then fair play - buy new. But, it loses 1/3 of the value or more the second you drive it home for the first time.

To be blunt, I haven't got the money for that. And the savings when getting a refurb are so vast that the risk of getting a stinker is massively outweighed by the value for money getting a high spec excutive model for the same price as a new low > mid range machine.

Yeah, was looking at the refurbs. Would have been fine getting one. Great value but they didn't have any 17" i7 at the time. I wanted to get something hefty that would still have a bit of grunt down the road. I haven't bought a laptop for 'The House' in years & the tablet is not great for all tasks. Hopefully it'll be with us & capable for a while to come.

There is something a bit fkkd with this G7 out of the box. Power / performance / graphics configuration. Realtek audio drivers & its control centre needs a good smack

[b0n0b0]

I have a dell g5 and the only real issue I had with it was something called smartbyte network management, which comes preinstalled and is =awful=. It adds latency to the whole system, once that was uninstalled it worked great.

[Ben Kohonays]

That's the most annoying thing about buying a computer, all the bloatware they load it with that you don't need.

[over9000]

My gf bought a lenovo 2 years ago, so far its great.
It doesent have the uber specs, but i can run ableton on it, when i go somewhere and stay in a hotel or something.
Its one of these things that you can turn into a tablet, and i wouldent recommend that model, as the unit is just so thin..
Suprisingly there are no problems with overheating or loud fans

[Críoch]

I have a dell g5 and the only real issue I had with it was something called smartbyte network management, which comes preinstalled and is =awful=. It adds latency to the whole system, once that was uninstalled it worked great.

Good call. Cheers man. Appreciate the tip.

Checked it out. People say its pure shit. Thankfully it's no on the G7. They must have removed it.

[mervv]

I got an Asus Zephyrus G14 last year. I've been using it to run Ableton and I use it in my live set. Been gigging with it 2-4 times a month for the last 4 months (Covid is basically totally controlled in the country I live in--no plague raves), no issues so far.

It's a "gaming" laptop but I got it because it's really powerful in a small form factor. Doesn't look too much like a gaming laptop, either. It's quite light-weight as well. Build quality is good, I feel comfortable hauling it around and bringing it on stage.

At home, even with a load of cpu-intensive plugins running and the audio interface's drivers set to a low latency I have yet to max it out. It's got one of those new AMD Ryzen chips.

AFAIK Ableton still isn't well optimized for multi-core processors, so single-core performance of each core is important for running Ableton well. That's part of why I chose this laptop and this processor.

I really like this laptop and would definitely recommend it for music or anything else.