600mhz Ibook, what can I expect from one? Options

[ottoasamotto]

I am looking at laptops to bring stuff to rehersals. I am really not impressed by the cheasy PC notebooks out there. The hardware can be a joke.

I had an iMac 33mhz and was always struggling with how slow it was. So I'm kinda worried about stepping into the sub-gig world of processors. But am hoping OSX makes up for it.

I plan on using Ableton modestly, as well as some sort of replacment for Fruity Loops to assemble loops.

What can I expect in terms of preformance?

[squibcake]

i've got the 600 mHz ibook machine and i have some mixed reviews. i've been using it with a MOTU 828 which i used to swear by under OS 9 conditions. AudioDesk used to work like a charm with just the 828 and my 400 MHz Powerbook G3, and i wasn't really interested in anything but your most basic midi operations. Now that i'm getting into midi, OSX audio on my iboox 600 mHz with maxed-out ram of 640 MB has been fairly sluggish. Reason 2.5 eats it for lunch, even when you're just trying to listen to the demo files. Live is a processor hog as well because it does everything in real time (although there's a guy's profile on the ableton web site who talks about how much he loves to use live on his clamshell ibook and swears by the "workhorse" nature of the G3 processor). DP4 is big and clunky as an OSX app so far and i haven't really found a way to get into it yet. I'm thinking about getting rid of the 828 and picking up an MBox instead (i'd love some advice on this one)...i've heard good things about that little bugger in conjunction with the iBook and pro tools seems to still be the industry standard essential application. It just seems that there's no great solution right now and everybody's spending all of their time trying to figure out what's gonna work best for them before they buy it rather than sitting down and making some music.

I don't really know what's most important anymore...fast hard drive? killer processor? lots of ram? increased system bus? I just remember going to a huge studio and seeing the engineer run a crazy-intense pro tools session off a G3 blue and white tower and thinking, damn...that's all i need to make some music. turns out that it isn't. check into the new baby powerbook if you're into reason. the G4 seems to run it perfectly.