The most important part of your laptop studio is, of course, your laptop. MusicXPC (“The world’s finest music production computers”) have released their latest laptop model, the Professional M3. Apart from the obvious things like a decent hard drive, it has a multitude of tweaks that make it good for music production. Not only is it engineered to be very quiet in operation, but the OS has been customised to ensure maximum processing power is devoted to music making.

“MusicXPC Professional is made for demanding media production professionals. It’s not a machine you would purchase for organizing photos or playing back MP3s, this is a machine for professional audio recording, mixing, mastering and media creation. The entire operating system has been configured for recording and playing back digital media using the popular professional software used by today’s media professional. Windows XP services that are not needed are turned OFF and the ones needed are turned ON.”

The website has a lot of information about this laptop. Their summary gives a good indication of its capabilities:

The M3 is a notebook tweaked for music production that features an Intel Pentium M 1.73GHz CPU, an 80GB 5,400 rpm hard drive, 512MB of DDR333 RAM (expandable to 2GB), a 15.4″ WXGA wide angle screen that gives you visibility even at off-axis points of view. The M3 comes with a recovery utility that stores the system factory settings outside of the Windows OS world in a host-protected area of the hard drive. This allows you to restore the M3 to the factory even if the hard drive has been accidentally re-formatted. The M3 has Gigabit LAN to improve workflow and play projects stored on other computers via Ethernet; built in 8X DVD+/-RW burner for archiving and more and more and more.