A ~2 year old Gateway M series laptop.

I'm gonna say 16" screen
1.66 Ghz Intel T5450 Core 2 Duo
3 GB Memory (I am assuming DDR2)
250 Gb HD
No firewire ports, but an open ext. slot thing I think I can put a firewire adapter card in.
Good condition

Now, it is from an older lady who lives in a condo where I work. She straight up told me the thing was just sitting on a bookshelf, so obviously it hasn't been in use. It had a thick layer of dust when she brought it down.

She seems to have taken good care of it well enough, though I am definitely going to give it a wipe and probably upgrade to Windows 7.

I might see if I can pay her in installments as well.

I figure I could buy a new computer of similar specs for under $500, plus it is two years old ...

Opinions?

From what i have read, PCMCIA firewire cards can be quite fussy. If you go that route, definitely do some research to see what is recommended for audio stuff. Some of the cheaper ones, apparently simply do not function correctly at all. Also, depending on how the card is designed, and how robustly the power rails of the laptop are specc'ed, merely trying to run a firewire port on a laptop that was not designed for it, can lead to all kinds of bizarre powershortage-related oddnesses and crashes. Read up, google keywords like "firewire card with Gateway (whatever exact model it is)..." and see what folks are saying, what kind of failures and/or successes they have had.

Anyhow, my gut feeling is that the laptop shouldn't be worth more than a couple hundred, but i honestly have no idea whatsoever what used laptop prices are like these days.

Bear in mind that the HDD is most likely a 5400 rpm drive. Also bear in mind that recording to your system drive is a recipe for tears. Factor in the cost of an external 7200rpm, or of a drive dock and a quick drive for it, if you intend to do recording with it.

300

Already got a an external HD just for that purpose.

But yeah, I am thinking of throwing out $200 as a starting price. If she wants higher, I'll explain to her all the extra costs and function problems.

THE OTHER ROUTE.

I pick this up on the cheap.

I grab one of those $400 video-cardless E-Machine towers from wal-mart and use that for recording. My manager bought one, slapped in a video card and uses it for some pretty power-hungry games with great results. I don't need the video card, already have all the peripherals, and could slap a firewire card into that with no issue if it doesn't have one.

Then I can use my laptop to store all my shit on, and keep my desktop pristine for recording.

1. Chris is dead on with the Firewire cards. I actually bought a PC Express firewire card and it did not do the job. AT ALL. Of course I went cheap, and I would hazard to say I should not have.

2. OK if you go the 2 computer way,... where do you store the pron????

~$40.

All pronz, musicas (not recorded by yours truly), movies and vidya games ... or all the things I download that destroy your computer ... would be stored on my laptop. I could take it to work for entertainment purposes, and I could use it for school. I mean, my current PC is so shitty it can barely handle my school work, especially stuff online. So, it would be nice to have something with the processing power to handle, say, multi-tap browsing

Then, my cheapo e-machine could handle all of my recording stuff. If I wanted to get back into gaming, I could easily slap a video card in there as well. It won't be high performance, but it will work. But then, I can keep the desktop free of downloading clutter or pron spywares. I can always upgrade i down the line, or just replace it eventually.

The reasoning behind it is, I could save up ~$850 and get a nice new laptop that will handle all of that. But, for ~$650 I can (hopefully, if negotiations go well) get a decent enough recording PC that is a lot more expandable/easy to upgrade. Plus it won't move, and won't get bogged down by my shenanigans. On top of that, I will have a "beater" laptop I can shenaniganize wherever I can take a laptop. I have traveling plans and such, and having a laptop that I wouldn't be super concerned about, especially if it didn't hold all of my recordings, would be nice.

This. Recording to a 5400 RPM drive with your OS on it is Not Cool. Doesn't matter what you're running.

So my manager might be upgrading his PC again soon (he is an ubar-gamrar), which means his e-machine with added ramses and a 1gigaton video card will be of no use. He has offered to sell it to me, so I might go the two computer route.

The old lady wishes she was a gadget-freak, and buys new computers all the time. Then, she has me teach her how to use them, like her tablet PC she just bought.

It is nice to know people who spend their money on things I need.


So, I might be picking up two used computers in the near future.

That would be doap.

I am using my laptop for everything these days, but i am a little scared of everything i own and have recoarded recently, being in only one place.

I also like the idea of add-on shit that using a proper desktop case brings to the table. Whether it is protools cards, or UA processor boards, or whatever, the expandability of a desktop is hard to fuck with.

Plus, desktop parts are significantly less expensive than laptop parts, ease of compatibility aside.

It would be nice to have a tower to record on. The laptop would just afford me the luxury of having something at work that lets me listen to music, watch movies, browse the internet and do basic gaming stuff while I'm bored. I can't do that on the work PCs.