Are computers now generally so powerful that even a laptop has the muscle for demanding applications?
For years, laptops have been the poor relations of desktop computers in terms of power and facilities, yet have remained expensive in comparison to their studio‑bound brethren. But things are changing...
I've just made a momentous decision: I'm going to buy a laptop computer. It's a big deal for me because for years I've managed to convince myself that laptops are a bad thing. You see, compared to desktop computers, they are expensive, less powerful, and difficult to maintain. And the last of those is an understatement: if you find yourself with a broken laptop from anything other than a top‑notch manufacturer, what you have is a paperweight.
We've grown accustomed to desktop computers. We're familiar with the way they're made. In the case of an IBM‑compatible PC, you can put together your own in the same wayyou'd make a soufflé from a list of ingredients. If your motherboard goes wrong you can buy a new one for not much more than the price of a tank full of petrol.
Not so with laptops. Every laptop model from every manufacturer is unique. No doubt there is platform sharing, with laptops from different manufacturers being similar in the same way that a Skoda is genetically similar to a Seat, but you can't just go to Computer Shopper and buy a new motherboard for the cheap no‑name Taiwanese laptop that you bought in Tottenham Court Road. And if your screen goes, so does the summer holiday that you were saving up for, because that's about what it'll cost to get it fixed — in the unlikely event that you can get spare parts more than a year after you bought the thing.
Then there's the biggest problem. You can't put cards inside them, which is a big deal if you're into electronic music or computer recording. (Martin Walker's piece on using laptops for music in SOS January 2001 is essential reading if you are thinking of buying one.)
Spec Up, Price Down
But there have been some important changes in the last few months, not the least of which is cost. Laptops have always been less powerful than their desktop counterparts. Putting it another way, for the same money a desktop will always have a better specification than a laptop, and this is still very much the case. What's changed is that desktop computers are now so ludicrously fast that even a mundanely specified laptop is a perfectly speedy machine. At the time of writing you can buy a desktop PC with a 2GHz processor, while the fastest laptops are barely better than 1GHz. Sounds pathetic, until you realise that it was only a year ago that 1GHz was the fastest processor you could get in anything.
Processing speed isn't the only thing that's available now in abundance. RAM prices are approaching the point where the box it's shipped in costs more than the memory itself. These days every computer should have 256Mb of RAM. If you've only got 128Mb, spend an extra tenner and double it. Laptop RAM costs more, but if you haggle with your computer supplier you'll probably be able to double the RAM to clinch the deal.
Laptop hard drives are expensive because they're smaller, and miniaturisation has always meant money. But surely you can struggle by with a 15Gb hard drive?
And then there's the screen. For at least five years I've been saying "this is the year when TFT screen prices will plummet," and for four years I've been completely wrong. But now you can buy a 15‑inch TFT computer monitor for well under £300, and I've even seen a 17‑inch one for only £75 more than that. Several manufacturers — Apple is one of them — have announced that they won't make any more CRT devices.
Until now, TFT screens have been a major reason for the high price of a laptop. They still are, but only in proportion to the whole cost. The simple fact is that laptop prices have come down so much that these machines are beginning to look like bargains. And of course there is a sense in which laptops have always outperformed desktop computers: portability.
By the time you read this, it should be possible to buy a laptop PC with a 1GHz processor, 256Mb RAM, a 15 or 20Gb hard drive (enough for 30 hours of uncompressed stereo 16‑bit audio) and a beautiful XGA (1024 x768) screen for under £1000.
Interface Issues
So on cost alone laptops are looking like a good bet. But there are even more compelling reasons for buying one now: IEEE 1394 (known as FireWire by Apple and I‑Link by Sony) and USB, to name just two. These serial interfaces are not unique to laptops. All new desktop computers have USB, and all new Macs and many laptop PCs have FireWire. (For those that don't, it's a £50 upgrade.) Now, the reason we fit expansion cards inside computers is to put them in touch with the system's processor(s). Until fairly recently, the only data interfaces computers had with the outside world were serial and parallel ports. These worthy but slow interfaces could just about do the job for modems and printing, but forget about using them for digital audio and video. They were orders of magnitude slower than even the old ISA bus, the predecessor to PCI.
The new breed of serial interfaces is fast enough that we can use them for real‑time digital media work. In other words, we can put our input/output devices (multi‑channel A‑D and D‑A converters, for example) outside the computer — the best place for them in noise terms — and still get the data to and from the central processor fast enough for the work to be done in real time. And if you don't have to open up the computer, then you don't need a computer you can open up. I still have doubts about using USB for audio work but FireWire is ideal for multi‑channel audio.
No less dramatic is the ability to connect storage using FireWire and USB. If you've ever messed around with SCSI, FireWire‑attached storage will amaze you. It's actually not as fast as SCSI, and possibly never will be, because SCSI is getting faster all the time, but it's way fast enough for almost anything you'll want to do on your drives, short of high‑definition TV editing. No, the really astonishing thing about FireWire drives is that you just plug them in and they work.
That last sentence is effectively the entire set of instructions for installing an FireWire drive. Incredible. If you're running an OS that supports FireWire storage (of which more later), you can add some without ever re‑booting your computer. Plug it in and up pops a message saying, "I've noticed you've plugged a new drive in and I've called it 'F:'", or whatever. Then you start copying files to it.
If you've ever had to upgrade your SCSI storage in the middle of a client's project, you'll understand what a revelation hot‑pluggable storage is. It's not without its dangers, though: you have to make sure that the drives have finished writing before you remove them. But that's a bit like saying that you have to wait until the airplane lands before you get out.
Size Matters
So now you don't need to worry about the size of your laptop's hard drive because you can just dump your data to an external device. There are already some great examples, which are not too expensive. Probably the cheapest way to add masses of external storage is the Maxtor 80Gb FireWire drive. It's essentially an E‑IDE drive in an external box, containing an E‑IDE‑to‑FireWire interface. It's quite bulky and not especially fast, but it's a lot of useful storage for about £300. Undoubtedly the coolest device is the very new Iomega Peerless drive. It's available with FireWire and USB connections and is a modular, cartridge‑based system. The disk cartridge sits in a desktop docking station, which is attached to the computer. Inside the cartridge is a 2.5‑inch laptop‑type hard drive with a capacity of either 10 or 20Gb. I've only tried the USB version, but it works very well indeed. It's not cheap, but I suspect that the bulk of the cost is due to the use of the small laptop‑type drives. I'd say the high cost is probably justified, because I can imagine the disk cartridges being thrown around, and, of course, laptop drives are — to some extent — designed for this kind of treatment.
Most exciting of all is that you can now get kits that consist of an empty drive enclosure with an E‑IDE‑to‑FireWire interface. What this does is allow you to use practically any E‑IDE device with a FireWire‑equipped laptop. So you can choose any drive you like, maybe taking advantage of some of the incredibly cheap ones around these days, or perhaps fit a faster drive that is more appropriate for multitrack audio on a laptop. I've even heard, although I haven't tried this, that you can use these drive bays with CDRWs and DVDRWs.
FireWire devices can be daisy‑chained together, so in theory you could have dozens of devices — although, of course, they all contend for the same bandwidth. However, anyone who is troubled by drive performance in a laptop audio project can stack together several FireWire drives and distribute the audio files that make up the tracks in their project between them, effectively using their speed in parallel.
Buyer Beware
A few miscellaneous thoughts for you if you're tempted to go out and buy a laptop. You need to analyse your needs very thoroughly. It's still the case that if you want a computer to sit at the heart of a serious studio setup you need a desktop or rackmount, preferably one of the designs optimised electrically and acoustically for studio use. But if you want a composition tool that takes up less space or that you can move around with you, go ahead — get a laptop. Many of my friends in the video industry are doing heavyweight video editing on laptops, where they can take the day's rushes (unedited video footage from a shoot) and put together previews within minutes.
Don't be tempted to buy ex‑demo models from shops, unless you're looking at a very good deal. Laptop screens have a surprisingly short life. With normal use they should last three to five years, but if one had been turned on in a shop for three months, all day, every day, that could equate to a year or more of normal use.
And do your research. I've found high‑street stores selling recently‑obsolete models for around £999, while the chainstore's own web site was advertising the replacement model with a faster processor, double the RAM and a DVD‑ROM instead of a CD‑ROM for the same price.
Which PC OS For Music?
What operating system am I going to choose for my new laptop? Well, obviously I want one that I can do music with. And it's not going to be Windows XP. In common with a lot of other people, I'm giving this one a miss because I object to being at the mercy of Microsoft's 'Product Activation' technology. I covered this in some detail in this column a few months ago, but I guess it's relevant to reiterate because XP will have been released by the time you read this. Use it at your peril. It audits the hardware in your computer, generates a 'signature' for your PC, and will de‑activate itself if it thinks you have copied it to another computer. The trouble is that it defines 'another computer' as any configuration different from the one it was installed into — even in the same computer. So you could be in the middle of a project, have to change a hard disk or even a graphics card, and find that your computer simply won't boot into Windows. You then have to email or phone Microsoft, and, essentially, plead with them to give you a re‑activation key. I use computers for a living and can't take the kind of risk of total system failure that Windows XP poses. That's my choice. Good luck to Microsoft if they want to persist with Product Activation.
I think I'll go for Windows 2000. This has been around long enough to establish a track record for stability, is beginning to get a decent number of device drivers, and works well with notebook computers. Windows ME is still around and is the option I'd use if Windows 2K didn't have the right drivers for the task in hand.