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Forum: General Discussion

Topic: Just cracking open the NEW BEAST! (laptop)

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After using my ACER Aspire for over a yr. and a half it was time to get the latest & hopefully greatest. Was going to get a MacBook, but for the same price decided to get this & have two weeks to test drive it.

Here are the details:

Intel Core i7-720QM processor,
17.3" HD screen,
1tb internal 7200 RPM SATA hard drive,
6mb DDR3 Ram, NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT230 Graphics with 1Gig DDR3 dedicated memory,
Windows 7 Premium 64 bit,
& a partridge in a pear tree!

HP Pavilion DV7-3074

Now it's time to get the ACER refreshed by doing a complete refurb with Windows 7 & have a great back-up & another lappy we can use for our ever expanding karaoke & music trivia end of the business.

Too many crashes lately with it. Hoping for the best with the NEW BEASTY!

Cheers!
 
Posted Tue 27 Oct 09 @ 12:44 am
Sounds beautiful!! My Toshiba Qosmio X305 Q708 SLI was a bank breaker at $4G's last December. Top of the line for that period, now I'm ready to try an Apple.

My new lappy is either going to be a 17" Mac Book Pro, or a 27" iMac Quad-Core. The iMac is all screen. The CPU and everything is all build into the screen. I just haven't figured out how I'll connect it to my flight case since the laptop stand won't work for it!



Congratz, that is a great computer you have there!


DJ RuDe


Keep Spinnin'!!
 
I was all ready to get the MacBook as I have always had Mac's also, but for the same price the specs on this will run circles around the Macs.

$1800 Canadian. Not cheap by any means but if it gives me another yr and a half like the ACER has, (5 gigs a week minimum mixing primarily video's) it will have more than paid for itself many times over.

This will be a GIG ONLY machine. The ACER was also my home computer, so did double duty, and has performed more than admirably considering the demands I put on it.

 
Sup Big Rob.. Nice machine.. enjoy it.... @ DJ Rude.. You will like the mac's. I bought a Macbook pro 2.4 Ghz core 2 duo with 4 gigs of Ram, 320 gig 7200 rpm HD with the Geforce 8600 GT video card 256mb. used but mint cond.. I got a crazy deal at 750 bucks. Its a little challenge for certain things because im more familiar with pc but its all good.
 
I love my Mac, I don't think I would ever go back to Pc. I highly recommend the Edirol Fa-66 soundcard with the MacBook Pro. I haven't had any issues so far with the combination of the MBP and the Edirol, we'll see Saturday night. Hopefully there will be some hotties there in some sweet halloween costumes. lol
 
1 TB internal HDD means 2 x 500GB. Still not bad.
 
FWIW, I have both a Macbook Pro running OS-X 10.5 and a Lenovo Thinkpad running Windows XP Pro; my plan had been to use the Mac running MacOS for VDJ. After trying that for a bit (with a Hercules RMX) I got tired of VDJ crashes and quirks, and got frustrated with the lack of video plugins. So I am now using the Thinkpad with VDJ for Windows... No crashes, plugins are availble, and it all just works. (I also gave up on the RMX, but that's a whole different story).

In my experience, the Mac version of VDJ isn't there yet. YMMV. (I considered running Bootcamp on the Mac, but it just didn't seem worth it, and VDJ under parallels just had too many limitations int he speed and video arena to be useful).

Niels.
 

Looks amazing..., I'm in the market to buy a new desktop mainly for video editing and presentation work, but my laptop isn't very good for live video mixing, I can't buy both, maybe a shuttle would be the best compromise.
 
Noticed the first strange glitches already lol

When I went to put my hand towards the top of the lappy to see how warm it was running, I happened to rub the volume slider which made the track playing in VDJ stop. Pressed play on my RMX & it went back to the beginning of the song and played again.





I could get it to do that over and over which I'm thinking I should NOT be able to do lol Any ideas?
 
Maybe your Volume Slider sends a 'Key' as a message for the volume to your Windows. Think you should change/disable your keyboard shortcuts to test if it's the reason for it.

Greets, Heiko
 
Just did that & it worked thx. I hate tweaking new things out.

I have:

set power performance to high performance,
internet disconnected,
Norton security off,
overclock on
safe mode off
keyboard shortcuts off

I know I'm forgetting something else here lol
 
Windows media volume keys trigger the shortcuts C (Normally cue) and B (Possibly assigned to beatlock) to VDJ, so you should delete these shortcuts via CONFIG -> Mappers if you don't need/use them.
 
You should also disable USB powersaving for all USB Ports.

Got to 'Control Panel - System - Device Manager' and then click on all the USB entries with the right mouse button to disable powersavement from windows.

Greets, Heiko
 
How does disabling USB powersaving help out when using VDJ?
 
dj rudd

why would you pay $4000 for a laptop, that is crazy man!!!

Sounds beautiful!! My Toshiba Qosmio X305 Q708 SLI was a bank breaker at $4G's last December. Top of the line for that period, now I'm ready to try an Apple.
 
djrobinhamilton wrote :
How does disabling USB powersaving help out when using VDJ?


If you want to use USB devices like controllers or harddrives - you could solv problems before you have them ;-)

Greets, Heiko
 
dj4nse wrote :
dj rudd

why would you pay $4000 for a laptop, that is crazy man!!!

DJRuDeDoGG wrote :
Sounds beautiful!! My Toshiba Qosmio X305 Q708 SLI was a bank breaker at $4G's last December. Top of the line for that period, now I'm ready to try an Apple.




The short answer..? Because I can! lol! The long answer: SLI, eSata, iLink IEEE 1394 Firewire, 4 USB ports, HDMI, Regza-Link (HDMI-CEC) 1080P support, DisplayPort, Face Recognition log-in, built-in surround sound w/subwoofer, Vista Ultimate 64, two hard drives and a solid state drive, and much more, excellent for gaming and everything else!!


DJ RuDe


Keep Spinnin'!!
 
Robin,

So has has your experiece been going with the new BEAST?
I just ordered a similar laptop ad waiting anxiously for it to arrive. I am upgrading from a MacBook Pro which was definitely nice, but very limiting if you are doing video with VDJ.

Any tips/tweaks other than what you have already mentioned? I assume you installed DirectX9 alongside the factory installed DirectX11?

-Frd

P.S. For anyone looking into similar machines, I have found that Costco.com has better prices than HP.com even when you have the "$500 coupon" for HP.com. And instead of paying $309 for 3 years of Accidental Damage protection at HP, you can get the 2 year Accidental Damage protection (!with LoJack!) from Costco for $99.
 


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