Re: [LAD] How well do thinkpad notebooks work for audio?

Hallo, hollunder(a)gmx.at hat gesagt: // hollunder(a)gmx.at wrote: The Thinkpads seem to have a pretty active net community doing sites like www.thinkwiki.org, which are very helpful. There's nothing bad about Intel CPUs, actually I consider them the best choice ATM for laptops, especially if you get a device with an Intel gfx chip inside, they have excellent FLOSS drivers. Personally I agree that Thinkpads are a bit overpriced, you can get equivalent laptops cheaper from manufacturers like Acer or MSI, which are the two companies I have first hand experience with: I have an MSI S260 which currently gets replaced by an Acer Timeline 3810T. Both are well supported by Linux. The new one requires bleeding edge software, i.e. Debian unstable in my case. On the ACER, no interrupts are shared when AHCI is enabled, but I guess, that's normal for AHCI: $ cat /proc/interrupts CPU0 0: 31601 IO-APIC-edge timer 1: 7186 IO-APIC-edge i8042 8: 99 IO-APIC-edge rtc0 9: 13850 IO-APIC-fasteoi acpi 12: 25164 IO-APIC-edge i8042 16: 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi uhci_hcd:usb3, uhci_hcd:usb7 18: 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi uhci_hcd:usb8 19: 24 IO-APIC-fasteoi ehci_hcd:usb1, uhci_hcd:usb6 21: 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi uhci_hcd:usb4 22: 182 IO-APIC-fasteoi HDA Intel 23: 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi ehci_hcd:usb2, uhci_hcd:usb5 26: 138998 PCI-MSI-edge i915 27: 8011 PCI-MSI-edge ahci 28: 61621 PCI-MSI-edge iwlagn NMI: 0 Non-maskable interrupts LOC: 15229 Local timer interrupts SPU: 0 Spurious interrupts RES: 0 Rescheduling interrupts CAL: 0 Function call interrupts TLB: 0 TLB shootdowns TRM: 0 Thermal event interrupts ERR: 0 MIS: 0 I didn't yet do any hardcore audio tests on that laptop, it's running an upstream large latency kernel. With laptops, I think, it's important to know your ways of using it. For example, the Acer is not the fastest device around (it's just a single Core CPU), but it's very light (1.65kg) and has an amazing battery life (up to 8h with dimmed display), so it's great to take on the road which is where I will be using it the most and where I can deal with a slower CPU, but not with a huge and heavy monster. The other extreme would be a netbook, but I prefer the 13" screen of the Acer - my eyes don't cope well with 10" screens, and Atoms just don't cut it in the long run for audio work. So to me, the Timeline is a good compromise, but your compromise will probably look different. Ciao -- Frank