RAM, recording only - does it matter?

[Scott P]

I have an old Dell C640 laptop that's been working great for years on location gigs. I've recorded up to 24 tracks internally for an hour with no problems at all running Windows 2K, a 7200 rpm drive, 1 gig of RAM and a P4. I love it because it doesn't seem to have all of the port conflicts that newer machines do.

I just found another one pretty reasonable and bought it. It's only got 1/2 gig of ram and a 20 gig HD. I'm wondering what difference the RAM makes if I'm only going to record on it.

I'm thinking that rather than drop a 7200 rpm internal disc inside and upgrade the memory, I might just leave it and add a ESATA drive and see what happens. This is a backup machine, but I don't want to have to experiment too much to find that it needs the upgrades. There's no driver disk, etc., so setting up the O/S is a bit time consuming.

Any suggestions?

Scott

[DominicPerry]

Fire up SAW and see how much memory is used. If you've got enough, you've got enough. The SAW Demo (all I've got at the moment :( ) fires up with 60MB used. I'm sure once you are running a few channels it will increase a bit. Don't be tempted to run a swap file, instead make sure you close down processes you don't need to free up memory.
An external drive is fine for even quite considerable channel counts, although I doubt that your laptop has an eSATA port.

Dominic

[Scott P]

Fire up SAW and see how much memory is used. If you've got enough, you've got enough. The SAW Demo (all I've got at the moment :( ) fires up with 60MB used. I'm sure once you are running a few channels it will increase a bit. Don't be tempted to run a swap file, instead make sure you close down processes you don't need to free up memory.
An external drive is fine for even quite considerable channel counts, although I doubt that your laptop has an eSATA port.

Dominic
I have no doubt that SAW will run on the memory that's there, but I need to know how much memory comes into play with 24-track counts. Maybe it goes straight to disc and doesn't use any, maybe not. I'm just trying to save some time by not hooking up a test. I'm hoping someone, maybe Bob, can tell me straight up.

As far as the ESATA port, no it doesn't have one, but I have a cardbus card that has worked well for transferring files, though I've never recorded directly to it yet. Fortunately, both of these 640's have two cardbus ports and I have one of the old RME cards that's slim enough that I can use both ports at the same time. I once had the slim card in with a newer RME card so that I could have access to 30+ inputs. I only recorded 20+ at once, but I needed to be able to swap them really fast. With pre-made mix templates it was just seconds to switch inputs (Thanks Bob!)

If this works well, I may be hunting down another, older slim RME cardbus card.

Scott

[Bob L]

The .5 gigs of ram should be enough... but Windows always runs better with more ram to draw from... so... I would consider getting it up to at least 1 if not 2 gigs in the future... RAM is pretty inexpensive now and one of the easier ways to improve stability and performance with high track counts.

Bob L

[Scott P]

Thanks Bob.

It will only hold 1 gig, which is what the other one has been running on. I wish it would use 2. :(

This is essentially a backup machine, so I don't have to have it running top speed right away. I just rarely see good used 640's and wanted to grab this one before it got away.

Right now, I'm thinking the first upgrade would be a 7200 rpm drive, but I'm waffling around on that. I'm just thinking I might best get that now since it looks like 7200 rpm eide drives for laptops aren't being offered much anymore. :eek:

Scott:D

[Bob L]

The 7200 drive is a definite bonus for large track count recording and playback... the older 4200 and 5400 drives can bog down quickly.

Bob L

[Scott P]

The 7200 drive is a definite bonus for large track count recording and playback... the older 4200 and 5400 drives can bog down quickly.

Bob L

That's why I may try using an external esata drive and see how that works. However, I have a Toshiba that has a 4200 rpm drive and I was surprised :eek: to be able to do 24 tracks to it without a problem. Still, it was a backup and I wouldn't want to trust it as a primary machine.

Scott