Cactus Music
My laptop is a P4 with1.5 Gigs of RAM. W XP 32 bit.
My wifes Lenovo is an i5 with 6 Gigs of RAM. W7 pro 64 bit. It was around $1,000.
I borrowed it to do some live recording because mine is pathetic. What blew me away was normally I have to optimize and tweak a dozen things before the DPCLAT meter comes down out of the red. The Lenovo was at the bottom without any tweaks. My point was that sometimes you get lucky with a laptop.
My P4 will work for audio but that's all. It was free. It works as long as you don't mind waiting 3 minutes for a screen re-draw after you hit stop.
you could build this same computer as your wife's in a desktop for around 600.00 (as I just did a quick price check estimate)
this also has dual onboard graphics, which I've had excellent experiences with, not for gaming, but for sonar, great luck.
its the same as the second monitor VGA EXT on the side of laptops.
and also 8 GB of RAM not 6GB like your wifes.
this also leaves things wide open for future upgrades.
I guess the point was trying to make was these aren't cheap junk set up's
600.00 will build you a decent rig for sonar.
but like anything, if I was using adobe photoshop for a living, I would probably go out and buy a machine built for fast processing.
not that custom built 600.00 rigs wont, but a high end will yield better faster results.
now how much of a difference? I guess it depends how serious you are.
for a lot of us, not that much, for the professionals here, it is a difference.