Hi everyone,

Currently I run Sibelius on a rather powerful (although a few years old) desktop system comprising a Core2Duo 2.5 GHz CPU, 4GB of RAM, and a solid state hard drive. I also run it on my wife's laptop, which has a dual-core Celeron 1.6 GHz CPU with 4GB of RAM and a mechanical hard drive. Clearly the performance is a bit worse on the laptop, but it's perfectly acceptable.

I am considering purchasing a new laptop for myself. My current laptop is woefully inadequate for Sibelius/VDL and is not an option. One route I can go is to purchase a laptop that uses an Intel Core i3 or i5 CPU, or an AMD Turion CPU, with 8GB of RAM. This is a ";traditional"; laptop configuration and product offerings seem to be in the 14-15"; screen size and 4-6 hours of battery life.

I would prefer a smaller laptop (my current is 12"; and I've become accustomed to it for east travel), but today's offerings for small laptops seem to utilize AMD Fusion, Intel Atom, or Intel UV/ULV (low voltage / ultra-low voltage) processors. Does anybody have experience running Sibelius and VDL on this technology? I don't know whether or not it is powerful enough.

I can get the ";traditional"; laptop with a 2.2 GHz Intel Core i3, which I know will do well with Sibelius, for about $550 plus tax/shipping. I can get the low-power option, with a 1.65 GHz AMD Fusion E-450, for about $425 plus tax/shipping.

Ah yes, my favorite geek topic.

All modern computers are ";fast enough"; for Sibelius + VDL.  I made one of the early VDL2 demos on a Mac mini G4 with 1GB of RAM just to see if it could be done, and that was a slow computer by 2006 standards.  My other early demos were with a Pentium M / 2 GB RAM ";fast"; laptop. 

Anyways, check out dealnews.com for great up-to-date prices.  If you put the SSD from your desktop into a new i5/i7 laptop, you could ditch the desktop completely.  I saw a quad-core i7 w/ 6 GB RAM Toshiba for only $650, although it's a bigger 16"; model.  Stay away from the Atom/Fusion stuff- they are very slow as a trade-off for 10+ hours of battery life.

Also, Mac laptops might cost more, but they also hold their resale value!  You could get a refurb Macbook Air for $800, and in a couple years still get $600+ for it, and you'll sell it in a day.  You can natively run Windows 7 if you don't like OS X.  All of my PC laptops became practically worthless and sat on craiglist/eBay forever, or I just gave them away to family.

 

Heh, the suggestion that I get rid of my desktop is funny... I am a gaming geek as well as a music nerd and that's not going to happen. Besides, using Sibelius on my three large monitors is nice. :)

Have you actually run Sibelius on an Atom- or Fusion-powered system?

I didn't run Sibelius because other programs weren't running well enough for me to consider it.  Those ";netbook"; computers were all the rage until the iPad showed up, now they are dying off.  A low-end i3 is something like 10X faster.  I saw a benchmark where a 1 minute mp3 encode on a i3 budget laptop took about 10 minutes on an atom system.  They usually have crappy screens too.

<---- Gaming geek as well... SWTOR is ruining my life.

Jesse, (not to entirely derail this thread ,but...) the last thing you said is the exact reason I haven't picked up Skyrim or SWTOR. However, I'm sure that they are both ridiculous.

yeah... um... my wife went out of town for 9 days for work training and instead of composing a symphony, I beat Skyrim and started SWTOR.  It's really sad. 

[quote author=J Mattson link=topic=4224.msg22076#msg22076 date=1326934400] I saw a benchmark where a 1 minute mp3 encode on a i3 budget laptop took about 10 minutes on an atom system.[/quote]Thanks; that's the sort of info I was hoping to get. i3/i5 it is.

[quote author=J Mattson link=topic=4224.msg22081#msg22081 date=1326944326]
yeah... um... my wife went out of town for 9 days for work training and instead of composing a symphony, I beat Skyrim and started SWTOR.  It's really sad. 
[/quote]

DORK!!!  :)