Hi Folks

It's me again here with a question. I play keys (A roland Clavinova) on the Praise band at my church along with a bass player and drummer. I am wanting to experiment with some additional orchestration by purchasing ABLETON LIVE 8, and adding some live sequences for play back and send a click track out via head phone to my drummer so that we would be all in sync and then I would have additional Horn parts etc playing in sync with us. In that way, I would be able to call up verse, chorus, bridge etc on the fly while playing. Now, I would need a good laptop to run ABLETON LIVE 8. I already have a Dell Latitude 610 Laptop with a 2 Ghz Pentium Single Core processor, 2 giggs of Ram, 60 gigs of hard drive Space running Windows XP Pro. I read on ABLETON LIVE website that they recommend a multi core processor for PC users.

I have about $885.00 in my budget right about now and a good friend of mine told me that it is best that I purchase a new Mac book from www.powermax.com for $899.00 because I can never go wrong with a Mac for any kind of Music purpose. On the other hand, Walmart is gonna have a big pre and post Thanksgiving sale soon where they’ll be offering a $298 notebook, the Compaq Presario CQ60-419WM, complete with a 160GB hard-drive and 3GB of RAM. This particular Laptop has a 2.10GHz multi core AMD Sempron processor, NVIDIA GeForce 8200M graphics and a DVD burner, together with WiFi b/g and a 15.6-inch 1366 x 768 display.

So I am like hmmmmmmmmmm for just $298.00, this looks like a powerful laptop and then I will have money left over to purchase ABLETON LIVE 8.

I need some advice here. Not sure which way to go......THE MAC...or the Compaq Laptop for what I would like to do and possible some studio work at the house now and again.

Hit me back y'all. One more thing. I am wondering if my Dell Latitude Laptop just may be sufficient. Any feed back thoughts, Tech advice, and insight y'all have for me, I'd much appreciate it.

Looking forward to Y'all's feed back in this scenario.

Jacobins