Custom netbook

[MLUKE089]

I acquired a netbook (Asus eee 1005hab) from a friend for cheap and it works great. I want to install some music making software (Mixcraft 6) onto it. From what I understand software will function the same on a netbook as it would a laptop. I can get a local computer shop to install 1 terabyte hard drive for a good price to allow me storage for my projects. The netbook runs Windows XP, which supports Mixcraft 6, but I am thinking about having the same computer shop install Windows 7. For the price that I bought the netbook from my friend, the upgrades to the netbook will save me hundreds compared to buying a 1 TB hard drive laptop. I am not going to use the netbook for anything other than my music projects.

My question is will the netbook support my Mixcraft 6 projects after upgrading the hard drive (and maybe the OS)? Thanks

[camerongray]

There's no reason why a larger hard drive won't work and it should run Windows 7/8.1 fine.  However, both of those upgrades are going to be expensive - I'd expect around $150 overall (for parts, excluding the labour of the person fitting them) which is likely more than the machine itself is worth.

You also have to watch with these old netbooks is that their CPUs are very weak so will be sluggish for even fairly basic tasks like web browsing, I wouldn't expect it to fare well with music production which is pretty reliant on the CPU.  I would strongly recommend you try Mixcraft on it before you pay for any upgrades to check that it will run it fine (and expect it to run a little slower with Windows 7/8.1) before you think about spending any more money on it.

[DaveLembke]

This netbook looks like it has just 1GB RAM in it unless your friend upgraded it before selling it.

These netbooks because they had weaker processing power Intel Atom CPU's usually came with Windows 7 Starter instead of the normal Home Premium, Professional, or Ultimate editions which was a more weak processor friendly version.

I have a Toshiba Netbook that I installed 2GB of RAM into which is the maximum that my model supports and yours may have the same memory capacity limitation. I tried Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit on my netbook thinking that is the best pair up for 7 since I am limited to maximum of 2GB of RAM, and it turned into being a pretty fast netbook with the SSD drive that I have installed on Windows XP Home SP3 to a snails pace with Windows 7 because the CPU is so weak in processing power.

I have since moved back to Windows XP Home SP3 with my netbook with the 90GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD installed. Swapping out the 160GB 5400rpm HDD with this 90GB SSD made a drastic improvement to both boot time and application launch times as well as it extended my battery life longer not wasting juice to spin platters and move the arm etc.

So my suggestion is that since you are only going to be using this for music to stick with Windows XP if you can do so.

I use my netbook as well with music, but use a piece of software called, MIXPAD which is FREE for Non-Commercial Use

This link shows all software they have... for the Mixpad I am using for multitrack support and editing etc see direct link at bottom of my post.
http://www.nch.com.au/index.html

You can record up to 4 tracks at the same time if you have an audio device that can take in 4 tracks through USB etc. I only use this for single tracks in which I record music directly from my Roland Amp that has a line out and then I plug the line out to line in on my netbooks internal sound card, so I can jam on my Ibanez and record a track and can play with it with the many features in Mixpad to edit out a section etc and save as a MP3 or save the project to work on later etc. Upon plugging anything into the headphone jack on the netbook I have it asks what type of device is connected to select for line in. After that its just setting levels etc and running with it.

Also with the 90GB SSD I have it would take a lot of recordings to fill the 45GB that I have free on it. I have quite a lot of recorded time on this drive and the MP3's that I generate and the project files to be able to edit the project later or copy segments out to blend in with other tracks etc also does not take up much room. So the 1TB drive  you are interested in will probably be overkill for storage capacity for what you want to do.

Here is a direct link to the Mixpad that I am using perfectly fine with Windows XP Home SP3 on a 1.66Ghz Intel Atom CPU with 2GB of DDR2 667Mhz RAM and 90GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD. http://www.nch.com.au/mixpad/index.html

*** Also I ran this software on just 1GB RAM just fine with XP on another system when wanting to have a larger area than a 10.1" display to work with all the tracks and precision of the mouse selection for chopping or adding sections at specific time markers etc.

[MLUKE089]

Thanks guys. I will test mixcraft on the netbook first and see how it runs (I have already purchased mixcraft). It sounds like sticking with XP will do the trick. I won't receive mixcraft for a few more days, but I will come back and post on the netbook's response to the software.

[strollin]

Poor netbooks.  They are always put down.

I have a 6 year old Acer Aspire One netbook that originally came with 1G of RAM, a 160G hdd and Win XP Home.  I bumped the RAM up to it's max of 1.5G, replaced the 160G hdd with a 64G ssd and installed Win 7 Pro on it.  I ran it that way for 4 years or so and did not encounter any performance issues.  About a year ago, I installed Win 8 on it and feel it runs Win 8 better than it ever ran Win XP or 7.

I am not familiar with the Mixcraft software you want to run but t should work reasonably well.  My netbook handles everything I throw at it.  Of course it won't be stellar at multi-tasking nor will it run the latest, graphics intensive games but for most other tasks the Atom processor does fine, it's pretty close in performance to a P4 in a less power hungry package.

The advice to try the Mixcraft software on the netbook before paying for any upgrades is right on.

[DaveLembke]

Of course it won't be stellar at multi-tasking nor will it run the latest, graphics intensive games but for most other tasks the Atom processor does fine, it's pretty close in performance to a P4 in a less power hungry package.

I agree that its the performance of a Pentium 4 but at like 13 watts which is what my 1.66Ghz runs at. I ran a benchmark on my netbook and it matched equally in processing power to that of a Pentium 4  2.53Ghz, but just like you stated at a drastic fraction of the power of a power hungry Pentium 4.

My netbook is the following: Toshiba NB205-N210 with Intel Atom N280   1.66Ghz ( which shows 2 cores, but the second I believe is just Hyperthreading just like a Pentium 4 HT) : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834114665

The biggest reason for buying this back in November 2009 was because it was advertised as lasting up to 9.08 hours on a full charge and at the time I just landed a gov job and was flying all over the place to get my required certifications and nothing stinks worse than being at an airport for a long layover and no outlets in sight to power a large laptop to that gets only 2 hrs of battery life use out of. So I would travel with my large gaming laptop and my netbook in the same computer bag. Ever since swapping the HDD with a SSD I have run it for almost 10 hours with my power config set to very green, underclocking the CPU when at idle and telling the display to shut off the backlight when idle for more than 5 minutes.

The only problem with travelling with 2 laptops is that the TSA raise a brow sometimes as it being an oddity and they grab both laptops off to the side to further inspect them and take a cotton swab to them to test for nitrates and other explosive material residue etc to see if they are actually bombs concealed as laptops etc. And my Gov ID doesnt work as an easy pass with the TSA, they can be as thorough as they want to be no matter who you are and no matter what gov info you show them etc to show them that your a good guy. But I am glad that they check everyone the same for my safety.

As far as:

Poor netbooks.  They are always put down.

I have nothing negative to say about mine.

Its great for what its capable of, but you will definately run into problems if you are using it for the wrong application such as gaming or watching streaming movies etc. Successful apllications would be programming, writing ( typing up ) papers, email, web surfing, and running Perl scripts on it such as one that generated URL paths to mine information from parsing web pages etc. The most complex game that runs on it is Diablo 2, but more modern similar games like Torchlight dont run well.

For mine to watch movies I have to run them in 360p or as a smaller window and not full screen or else I end up with perfect audio and snap shots that update once every 3 or 4 seconds of whatever is happening in the movie etc, although oddly enough local AVI videos etc will run perfectly fine on it. I think this is because of the data assembly process of the streaming video packets that have to happen as part of the streamed video. If there was a way to say I want to watch a movie from netflix and allow the netbook to fully cache the movie locally and then play it, it would have all of its processing power available to play the movie vs maintain handshake to netflix and assemble the video quickly and then play it to display with the weak integrated video which is also part of the Intel Atoms APU ( CPU + GPU ) in a single chip, so when the CPU portion of the APU is busy, the GPU portion of the APU falls behind.

Bad applications for one of these is expecting it to play modern games on it. Mine even chokes up with Facebook games like slot machines where the GPU cant simulate the dials rolling and so the game lags out when the dials are spinning and the game becomes responsive again when the dials stop to put in another virtual coin etc and pull the virtual handle again. While other games that are more web based that you make a decision and the decision is handed off to the server and the server handles the processing power of what happened and returns the clients browser with the end result such as a Battleship type game of HIT or MISS with a user interface that is just an updated picture showing misses and hits, the netbooks Intel Atom handles it very well, since its pretty much no different than surfing a web site with a search engine and the search engine coming back with results.

I have even set my power settings to maximum performance to see where it made a difference and it just meant that the display stayed on all the time, the clock didnt throttle but stayed 1.66Ghz all the time and battery life dived down to like 4.5 hours.

[patio]

Netbooks have earned their reputation...please don't state poor netbooks.

[strollin]

Netbooks have earned their reputation...please don't state poor netbooks.

I respectfully disagree with that statement.  Many people bought netbooks expecting them to do things that they weren't designed for.  When used within their design parameters they are nice little machines.  For typical computing tasks such as surfing the web, email, word processing, spreadsheets, etc... they are fine.  They were not designed to replace laptops or desktops to do things that required heavy multi-tasking or intensive graphics operations.

[MLUKE089]

I have installed Mixcraft 6 onto the netbook and it is running pretty well. MIDI controls react well also. It looks like I will need to change the OS to accommodate MASSIVE 1.4 software. The OS has to be Windows 7 or 8 to run this software. I could really use this software for my projects. Is there anything that I can tinker with on the netbook to help with response to the new OS or is Windows 7/8 a bad choice? You all have been very helpful. Thank you all.

[DaveLembke]

For that software you may need to think about a different computer:

This sound quality, of course, comes at a price: high processing demands. The published system requirements are a 1.4Ghz G4, Pentium or Athlon, but I think this is too low. I tested Massive on a G5 Dual 2.7GHz Mac and a 2GHz Intel Core Duo Macbook Pro, and even these worked up a sweat. On the G5, I usually use Ableton Live with the buffer at 256 samples, but Massive stuttered and refused to play properly. It was perfectly smooth at Live's default 512-sample buffer, however. In both Live and stand-alone modes most patches reported about 20 to 30 percent CPU usage during normal playing. On the same patches, the Macbook Pro reported about 30 percent higher CPU usage. This was for presets using one to six voices, which is actually enough for most patches as the sounds are so, well, massive. Pads and decaying sounds that use more voices eat further into CPU resources. By default, Massive is limited to 16 voices, and using all at once generally had the processor of my G5 pushing 70 percent. This is pretty high even compared to heavy Reaktor synths. Very roughly speaking, it's about twice as CPU intensive as Absynth 4, or FM8 in high quality mode, and a bit heavier than Arturia's analogue emulations, like the Minimoog V, voice-for-voice. There are bound to be many who find Massive's CPU hit prohibitive, but I think it makes sense. From what I've seen, the trend is away from multitrack MIDI recording and towards recording and manipulating audio, and also towards simple and less restrictive freeze functions in modern hosts

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb07/articles/nimassive.htm

Do you really need to stick with this netbook?

Based on info found online I feel that you will have performance problems using that software with the netbook, and you may want to find a more powerful system such as a used system with a Dual-Core 2.5Ghz or better CPU...   

The systems that the author is referring to that were working up quite a sweat to run this NI Massive Software, benchmark at about 5.7 x faster than your Atom CPU, which means that the Atom would most likely lag out and just start pumping heat out of the CPU vent. I have had my netbook to its knees before and CPU fan goes 100% and warm air rushes out. Below is comparison just showing how weak the Intel Atom is ...


[recovering disk space, attachment deleted by admin]

[MLUKE089]

Yuck! Well that's too bad then. Thank you for the help. I have an i7 laptop for personal use. I may have to consider using that. My luck with the netbook has run out it seems.