Good morning guys. I'm thinking about upgrading my laptop. What do you suggest? An SSD, 16 gigs of RAM or a new CPU? Currently I have 1 TB HDD, 8GB RAM and a shitty Intel i7 2 core @2ghz CPU.

 

An SSD would be nice, but not much capacity for the cost.

It also depends on how full the HD is. If you have less than 500GB free and plan to install a lot of large sample libraries, then go for a new HD. Hard drives shouldn't be filled to more than around 80% capacity for best performance.

You may want to also consider an external drive for large sample libraries.

Or what about a whole new laptop? Newegg has some great deals on refurbed laptops. I got one last year for less than $200.

Barring that I would say go for the CPU, but it really depends on what you're doing with the laptop currently. Are you hitting any bottlenecks related to RAM or CPU? Is the CPU maxed a lot. If not, then maybe more RAM would be better. Don't forget heat and power considerations. A new CPU may decrease battery life or cause the laptop to run hotter.

 

Last edited: Sep 10, 2016

You really dont need an SSD, I have all my music samples and material saved to an Internal HDD and a external. I back up my internal to an external once a month or when I know I have to work on a project while on the road.

CPU and RAM def need upgrading.

 

Was thinking about doing the exact same thing, maybe a hackintosh or a i7 quad look pretty good on paper, anyone ?

 

i made recently a hackitosh with i7 6700k with just spend around 900$ and just was preaty easy to setup and was my first DIY computer, i recomend you a hackintosh with some skylake cpu

 

Depending on your type of production CPU or RAM will make the biggest impact.
In case you work with Kontakt most of the time, 16GB RAM would be immediately noticeable. CPU not so much.

 

By 'upgrading' you mean replacing, right?

That would most likely be a downgrade instorage, unless you replace the ODD

That's p.goot.

It's not that shit. It's 2C+HT iirc, and it should turbo to 3ghz.

Unless you;re having specific performance problems, no really need to upgrade. And specific performance problems can commonly be solved without upgrading ka replacing your laptop,.

 

Thanks for the feedback guys. I'll say these things so you can understand a little bit better what I should change on my laptop. I use Ableton as my main DAW. Sometimes when I open up a project it takes a lot of time to load properly the clips and play them. The other thing is for example when I use 1 instance of Kontakt, 1 of Omnisphere and 1 or 2 more VST instruments the CPU usage goes to 100%. Same with FL and same with S1. I load a 10 track sess in S1 and when I start bringing in some VST effects (not instruments-reverb, EQ etc) then it starts laging af.

 

ssd. swap out old hdd with the dvd tray . best upgrade i ever did

 

Not necessarily, all laptops after HM67 can be upgraded to 16GB RAM just by replacing RAM modules. And since he mentioned i7 as a dual core, then I'd almost bet it's i7-2620M or i7-2640M, running at 2.7GHz and 2.8GHz respectively, therefore rPGA988 socket (Socket G2). He could fit a decent quad-core in there (i7-2720QM, i7-2740QM, ...), assuming it's not BGA.

But analysing the problem in depth, I think the RAM is the issue.

 

Processor is Intel Core i7 3537U @ 2GHz, 2 Cores, 4 Logical Processors.

 

Six months ago I was in the same dilemma but after a while it became crystal clear that a new desktop PC makes much more sense than a new laptop: For the same cash, you can have a much more powerful machine.

Just an example: Not even sure that you can find any laptop with 64 GB of RAM and if yes I'm very curious to see how much it costs.
Even any laptop with 32 GB of RAM will cost you more than 2,000 euros/dollars. Compare this with a desktop PC with the same amount of RAM and a very good CPU and you get the big idea.

 

Then it's clear, you can't upgrade the CPU. It's soldered on the system board.
Still should be an option with the RAM.

 

Screw CPU and RAM, get a SSD. I'm on a i7-4712MQ @2.3GHz with 16 GB of RAM and honestly never hit more than like 60-80% of the CPU and 60% of RAM unless I work on something really heavy. SSD is the way to go - your system boots in 7 seconds instead of 2 minutes, your Kontakt libraries load in 10 seconds instead of 3 minutes times the amount of Kontakt instances you have in your project. Also it's fun even for gaming (waay quicker load times inbetween locations in Skyrim! :D)

 

I know you're right but I wanted to change only some parts. I don;t want to buy a new one.

 

God damn it. I guess I'll go with a new desktop sooner or later. Thanks for your time.

 

Maybe I'll try upgrading my RAM first to see what happens.

 

The thing that upsets me the most is that my previous laptop (a Toshiba QOSMIO-old model) didn't give a single duck about all this. I could do everything. And this one, VAIO, oh boy, it's just so fucked up when it comes to creating music.

 

It could be then a latency issue caused by a faulty driver, usually wireless LAN. Might be a good idea to do some digging before spending cash for new components.

 

SSD + more ram.

applications on ssd , samples on external(s) HD ( 7200 rpm -or more- even better if it's in RAiD or another SSD )

and yes, definitely you will notice adding some RAM, but the more the better, trust me