Music studio used laptop recommendation

[Marador]

Hello everybody,

I just build a music home studio, and after many attempts with my old XPS 1530m (core duo 4GB) to record music (not enough CPU and RAM) I realized that is time to upgrade my laptop

The idea is to buy a used laptop on ebay because I think that is not worth to spend 700£ in a new laptop for a sporadic use.

Use of the laptop:

• 
  Record and mix music with Cubase
  Play games like Lol about 1 month a year (holidays)

Requirements:

• 
  Be a laptop to be able to use it to mix music outside home
  Less than 200£
  I7 and 8GB ram
  Cheap Graphic card to play League of legends, counter or wow when I am out of home

Any recommendations?

 

[JeffDaemon]

You won't find anything even close to an i7 for 200£. Infact at 200£ you arn't looking at much of an upgrade. Light gaming is still going to be asking for a laptop with a x40m gtx gpu in it, so look at about 500 pounds. You can probably find some deals on used laptops with these video chipsets but you will probably run into 2 pools of users, 1) upgraded to a faster gaming computer and will let it go at a good price because he just wants to be rid of it, and 2) never used it and because he paid 900£ for it originally he won't let it go for less than 700.

 

[Verndewdimus]

At college they sent us mid 2012 macbook pro's with these specs.
Intel i7 @2.6 with a boost to 3.6ghz
8 gb ram
nvidia 650m
BUT they almost demanded we get an external drive to save our music project files and audio on. The reason should be obvious as there is a limit to how much reading and writing one HDD can do at once, not having an external HD i wound up with a lot of stalling when mixing and recording . 8gb or ram is minimal for all the plugins and processes, and will not be enough if you need a lot of plug ins and fx/dynamics.
Make sure that youre grouping for verb fx so they arent on every channel. If youre doing high track counts you need more ram. Sophisticated music production takes a bit of power, but the bare minimum is two hd's a quad core at 2.6-3ghz and installing sound libraries on the second hd as well as saving all audio and music project files to the second hd.

https/www.amazon.com/s?rh=n%3A565108%2Cp_n_feature_fourteen_browse-bin%3A2057441011 If you dont have an audio i/o that does signal processing you need one, like am Mbox or something.

 

[velo3100]

For that low of a price, i don't think you will find a machine that is build for recording music.