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Greetings, everyone,

I'll be going to college this August and will need a laptop for the music program. I have to get and will use both Sibelius 6 and Pro Tools LE 8 and I need some help finding the right machine for PT. As I see it, the system requirements for Sibelius are pretty open-and-shut and anything that will run the Pro Tools will run Sibelius, but finding something right for PT in my price range (i.e. I can't afford a MacBook Pro) is pretty tough. I'm sure some of you here are familiar with it and can point me in the right direction.

Based on my research so far, this is what I have found that I would need in a machine to run PTLE 8. The machine would probably need to have 4gb of RAM. That's not very hard to find. It will also need a video graphics card (*not* integrated). A second hard drive (non-USB) is needed to run Pro Tools well, so it would require an eSATA port (preferable), Firewire port (more preferable), or the option to install either of those (less preferable).

The one thing that is confusing to me is the processor. I believe that any AMD processor is out and will not work with PT (don't ask me why). I have heard good results from the Intel i5 and i7 processors, so I think those two would be fine.

Windows 7 support for PTLE is in its infantile stage, I think. I've heard of a handful of problems people have with it, but Digidesign has some instructions that should make everyone run smoothly on 7. Any new laptop I get is going to come with 7, anyway.

I think that's about it. I appreciate any help you guys can give me.

Thanks,
Jackson

What exactly is the price range you need the laptop in for this?
First of all, I don't deal with Pro Tools, so I may be completely clueless...
but, as far as what you said, besides the AMD processor, it fits what you were saying for the most part...

What I have is a 4 GB DDR2 RAM, 500 GB hard drive, and it has an eSATA port...but it has an AMD dual core Turion II processor~2.4 GHz. However, I am not sure about the graphics card of this thing...if there's anywhere this machine is lacking, is the graphics...Most stuff is pretty awesome on this thing though, since it does HD and whatever else you want. It has a Blu-Ray disc player, along with read and write DVD's, and the Lightscribe thing is pretty cool. Plus, I think I paid less for this than any Mac product that I know of...What I got is an HP Pavillion dv7-3065dx...maybe you can check one out or a newer version of it for a comparable price...and I think I got it for around $800