Mac G4 Laptop And Digital Performer, is this machine good enough? Options

[ssagala]

Hello,

I am looking at a G4 Titanium laptop at with 128 MB ram and a 500 MHz processor. My question to all the mac experts out there is will this machine be able to cope with digital performer 4? I plan on getting a memory uprade and an extra firewire drive to actually record to eventually but this will have to do for the moment. I have a good offe for it at the moment- do you think this machine is worth buying?

Thanks for your help. :-D

[Marcia]

If you plan on running more than 8 tracks you may run into problems. I have a 1 Ghz Titanium (1Ghz RAM) G4 and running DP4 on a song that contained 15 tracks with multiple f/x on each one (avg. 3-4 per track) had the processor pegged. But it never went down on me once and probably would have taken more abuse still. But the guage was 'in the red' and the little puppy was smoking, you could feel the heat. But these laptops are very solid and reliable, I've had mine a year and it has only locked up 3-4 times on me. I've only restarted it maybe 6 times and leave it running all the time. My advice would be to hold out and get all you can. You may save money now to get a slower computer, but if you outgrow it, you also just threw at least some of that money away if you don't recoup it. If you are using Reason or more MIDI based stuff, or not needing as many tracks then you may get by. But as you grow as a recording musician, you may later want more tracks/processing power to grow with you. Personally, I don't feel 500 Mhz is nearly enough for DP4, especially if you plan on using f/x.

~Marcia