Lenovo 2013 IdeaPad (i7-4500U 1.8/2.4 GHz)

[Bill Phillips]

I'm doing clean W10 install on a LenovoIdeaPad U530 Touch. Just creating the usb media is taking forever. My plan is to put Cakewalk on it for recording and rough mixes with a Focusrite 18i8 gen3. It has a 500 GB 5400 rpm SATA HD + 8 GB SSD  and 8GB DDR3L 1600 RAM. I'm hoping that replacing the HD with a 1 TB SSD will improve performance significantly. Looks like it had an optional 256 GB SATA III drive. So maybe it supports SATA III.

Am I wasting my time? If not, any suggestions?

[Lord Tim]

Wow those specs are... odd!

The *U series processors aren't particularly powerful (they're more about being light rather than powerful) and 8GB RAM is pretty lean, but I ran CbB on an ancient dual core machine with 8GB of RAM for years and got away with it (although it was pretty painful sometimes). Your biggest bottleneck will be your HDD, I'd say. Swapping my HDD out for a SSD was a MASSIVE improvement in speed for everything, so it's a good decision to start there. This system is wayyyy more powerful than my crappy old one in most ways though, so it could be fine if you're not loading up 300 tracks of orchestral libraries or anything.

Does that thing really have an 8GB SSD in it? ? Is that a cache or recovery image or something?

[msmcleod]

FWIW - I tried a MeLE Silent PC running at 2GHz + 8GB RAM with a 1st gen 18i8, recording 16 simultaneous tracks whilst playing back 32 tracks I'd previously recorded.  The MeLE had zero problems with the recordings. 

Obviously this is nowhere near powerful to mix on (I didn't even bother trying  to add plugins), but for straight multi-track recording, it did the job with no issues.  Considering this thing is only slightly larger than an old cassette case and has literally no moving parts, I was impressed.

I tried recording both to the internal SSD and an external SDD connected via USB3 - it was fine in both scenarios.

This is the rig I used for recording:


 

[Bill Phillips]

2 hours ago, msmcleod said:

FWIW - I tried a MeLE Silent PC running at 2GHz + 8GB RAM with a 1st gen 18i8, recording 16 simultaneous tracks whilst playing back 32 tracks I'd previously recorded.  The MeLE had zero problems with the recordings. 

Obviously this is nowhere near powerful to mix on (I didn't even bother trying  to add plugins), but for straight multi-track recording, it did the job with no issues.  Considering this thing is only slightly larger than an old cassette case and has literally no moving parts, I was impressed.

I tried recording both to the internal SSD and an external SDD connected via USB3 - it was fine in both scenarios.

This is the rig I used for recording:


 

Encouraging. Thanks. I don't recall ever seeing a MeLE. And you've got 4 line and 1 SPDIF inputs left to add another 6 inputs.

[Bill Phillips]

3 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

Wow those specs are... odd!

The *U series processors aren't particularly powerful (they're more about being light rather than powerful) and 8GB RAM is pretty lean, but I ran CbB on an ancient dual core machine with 8GB of RAM for years and got away with it (although it was pretty painful sometimes). Your biggest bottleneck will be your HDD, I'd say. Swapping my HDD out for a SSD was a MASSIVE improvement in speed for everything, so it's a good decision to start there. This system is wayyyy more powerful than my crappy old one in most ways though, so it could be fine if you're not loading up 300 tracks of orchestral libraries or anything.

Does that thing really have an 8GB SSD in it? ? Is that a cache or recovery image or something?

Thanks. I definitely plan to replace the HD with an SSD. I've never done that in a laptop before but I have the Hardware Maintenance Manual. It shows 16 screws in the back cover alone. And it warns that the nylon coated screws will be difficult to remove and shouldn't be reused. But I plan to reuse them. I'll have to make sure to get the right screwdriver.

As for the 8 GB SSD. AFAIR the 8 GB SSD was advertised as a SSD buffer for the 500 GB HD improving the performance of the HD. The SSD doesn't show up in the Disk Manager.

[scook]

4 hours ago, Bill Phillips said:

500 GB 5400 rpm SATA HD + 8 GB SSD 

This refers to what Seagate calls a hybrid drive. It is one drive, a 500 GB spinner with a built-in 8 GB SSD acting as a cache for the spinning drive.

Read performance is better than a regular 5400 rpm spinner on smaller often read files. Not so much on large file or cache misses. Overall drive performance depends on how the drive is used. 

[Lord Tim]

Ah wow, I haven't seen a hybrid drive in years - I forgot they even existed!

Now that the price of SSDs have tumbled, there's not really much of a good reason to use a slow spinning disc in a laptop these days.

[Starship Krupa]

Your system exceeds the specs of the Dell laptop I'm retiring and it's able to run Cakewalk just fine, even with multiple orchestral instruments. The only issue I can see is that the processor is only a 2 core (4 virtual). DAW's like as many cores as they can get. Is what it is, though.

I'm good at Windows and BIOS tuning, which leads to my computers being from the stone age yet still able to do DAW and NLE work. I just renovated an old Gateway(!) Core 2 Quad system to give to a friend. It runs Cakewalk just fine with 8G of RAM and SATA III SSD, and an older nVidia Quadro,

The 1TB SSD is a very good idea. That 5400 hybrid spinner is the biggest bottleneck on your system. Install the SSD before you install Windows 10. My favorite price:performance brand of SSD's is Silicon Power. You can probably get one on Amazon for $50 and have it tomorrow.

Write down your Windows product key before you burn down the old installation. You can probably install and activate Windows okay without doing that, but be sure. At some point, laptops started using motherboard license keys, but yours is kinda old. Probably had a key for Windows 8?

If you can cram 16 or 12G of RAM in it, do so. The more RAM the merrier, and 16G is about the "don't be concerned about how much RAM you have" point these days. But my old Latitude only has 8G and is fine for DAW work and even Vegas Movie Studio.

Once you get the system put together and Windows 10 installed, it will do its thing of sending a buttload of telemetry to Microsoft. This settles down after about 24 hours. During that time, the system will be unnaturally slow, so don't worry.

To get your processor to spin up to 3GHz and stick around that point, enable Turbo and Speedstep in your BIOS (and check with Lenovo to make sure you have the latest BIOS). Turbo is a must, Speedstep may or may not help. Turn off C States. Use Task Manager (or better still, HWINFO) to monitor where your processor's clock is hovering. Make sure that hyperthreading is also enabled in the BIOS.

In your advanced power settings, set your processor's minimum and maximum speeds to 100% while on charger. This will make for a lot of power eating, so if you are planning on doing a lot of DAW work on battery, you can set it that way for battery as well but expect reduced battery life. Better to just bring your charger with you when you want to get your DAW on.

Get whatever system and video driver packages you can from Lenovo's site (the video driver and chipset drivers are the most important). Then you can go around to the sites for Intel and Realtek and so on to pick up the latest drivers (although Windows 10 is pretty good about hunting down drivers, just check in Updates for optional updates). 

Exclude your Cakewalk project folder and VST/3 folders from Defender's realtime malware scanning.

After you do all that, run LatencyMon and see if there is anything tripping your system up. My new(er) Latitude 7480 is notorious for getting hammered by ACPI.SYS, so I had to track down a workaround setting for that.

A "clean" installation of Windows 10 is fairly free of crapware, but it does enable some things like Skype and Meet and XBox that I'm not interested in on my laptop. You can uninstall Skype and use the Services app to disable the XBox stuff if you don't want them running.

If you want to get even fancier, Process Lasso is a good way to monitor what processes are running in the background and take control of them.

Do all this stuff and your Lenovo should work quite well for audio recording and even mixing. If you've gotten used to it with the 5400 hybrid spinner, you will be blown away by how fast it boots and starts programs and loads projects with an SSD and a fresh install of Windows. It'll be like getting a whole new laptop.

(all bits of software that I mentioned are freeware)

[Bill Phillips]

6 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Your system exceeds the specs of the Dell laptop I'm retiring and it's able to run Cakewalk just fine, even with multiple orchestral instruments. The only issue I can see is that the processor is only a 2 core (4 virtual). DAW's like as many cores as they can get. Is what it is, though.

I'm good at Windows and BIOS tuning, which leads to my computers being from the stone age yet still able to do DAW and NLE work. I just renovated an old Gateway(!) Core 2 Quad system to give to a friend. It runs Cakewalk just fine with 8G of RAM and SATA III SSD, and an older nVidia Quadro,

The 1TB SSD is a very good idea. That 5400 hybrid spinner is the biggest bottleneck on your system. Install the SSD before you install Windows 10. My favorite price:performance brand of SSD's is Silicon Power. You can probably get one on Amazon for $50 and have it tomorrow.

Write down your Windows product key before you burn down the old installation. You can probably install and activate Windows okay without doing that, but be sure. At some point, laptops started using motherboard license keys, but yours is kinda old. Probably had a key for Windows 8?

If you can cram 16 or 12G of RAM in it, do so. The more RAM the merrier, and 16G is about the "don't be concerned about how much RAM you have" point these days. But my old Latitude only has 8G and is fine for DAW work and even Vegas Movie Studio.

Once you get the system put together and Windows 10 installed, it will do its thing of sending a buttload of telemetry to Microsoft. This settles down after about 24 hours. During that time, the system will be unnaturally slow, so don't worry.

To get your processor to spin up to 3GHz and stick around that point, enable Turbo and Speedstep in your BIOS (and check with Lenovo to make sure you have the latest BIOS). Turbo is a must, Speedstep may or may not help. Turn off C States. Use Task Manager (or better still, HWINFO) to monitor where your processor's clock is hovering. Make sure that hyperthreading is also enabled in the BIOS.

In your advanced power settings, set your processor's minimum and maximum speeds to 100% while on charger. This will make for a lot of power eating, so if you are planning on doing a lot of DAW work on battery, you can set it that way for battery as well but expect reduced battery life. Better to just bring your charger with you when you want to get your DAW on.

Get whatever system and video driver packages you can from Lenovo's site (the video driver and chipset drivers are the most important). Then you can go around to the sites for Intel and Realtek and so on to pick up the latest drivers (although Windows 10 is pretty good about hunting down drivers, just check in Updates for optional updates). 

Exclude your Cakewalk project folder and VST/3 folders from Defender's realtime malware scanning.

After you do all that, run LatencyMon and see if there is anything tripping your system up. My new(er) Latitude 7480 is notorious for getting hammered by ACPI.SYS, so I had to track down a workaround setting for that.

A "clean" installation of Windows 10 is fairly free of crapware, but it does enable some things like Skype and Meet and XBox that I'm not interested in on my laptop. You can uninstall Skype and use the Services app to disable the XBox stuff if you don't want them running.

If you want to get even fancier, Process Lasso is a good way to monitor what processes are running in the background and take control of them.

Do all this stuff and your Lenovo should work quite well for audio recording and even mixing. If you've gotten used to it with the 5400 hybrid spinner, you will be blown away by how fast it boots and starts programs and loads projects with an SSD and a fresh install of Windows. It'll be like getting a whole new laptop.

(all bits of software that I mentioned are freeware)

Wow! Thanks. I'll go through all your suggestions as I work through this. Thanks again.