Looking for lap top for synching I tunes??

Missymoohaa

Hi All,

My friend is looking for a good, cheapish lap top/net book purely for synching i tunes with. She has an i phone and her actual lap top is a work one and she's not allowed to do the synching bit with it. Anybody any ideas, I'm good with phones but a bit green when it comes to lap tops/net books.

Torqay

Since iTunes is a particularly nasty and resource hogging piece of malicious software with great potential to bring even the fastest computer to a crawl, I'd recommend at least a quad core i7 processor with a minimum of 8 GB RAM.

Seriously, any cheap Core i3 laptop will do, first generation models are going for less than €400 these days, this Packard Bell costs 370 yoyos at LD.

Peregrine

As the previous poster said. Most laptops out there can sync with iTunes perfectly fine. At least 2 GB RAM and any modern processor. They'd start at around €350 or €400

Missymoohaa

She's now saying that a lap top might be too much for what she wants that a net book might suffice (as she always has the work lap top for other stuff) I was looking at an Acer netbook in PC World, what do you think.

BTW thanks for your help:

http://www.pcworld.ie/categories/Netbooks/2.5

yoyo

Missymoohaa wrote: »

She's now saying that a lap top might be too much for what she wants that a net book might suffice (as she always has the work lap top for other stuff) I was looking at an Acer netbook in PC World, what do you think.

BTW thanks for your help:

http://www.pcworld.ie/categories/Netbooks/2.5

A netbook should be fine, iTunes is a pig at using up resources but for occasional syncing she should be ok. I would go for an Asus over Acer if possible, Acer's build quality can be poor at times. Check out this I found under your link, seems quite reasonably priced. It comes with 1gb of RAM like most netbooks, a cheap upgrade by purchasing a 2gb memory module for it wouldn't be a bad idea, but see how she fares with the 1 gig

Nick

Peregrine

Well if she's only going to use it for syncing her iPhone and nothing else then a netbook will do yeah

The one Nick mentioned looks rather good, the only possible downside I see is the fact that it only has 2 USB ports. If she will have nothing else plugged into it then it's grand.

There's this one for €10 more, it has an extra USB port but less battery life:
http://www.pcworld.ie/Product/ACER-Aspire-One-D270-Netbook/310283/2.5.0

bonzodog2

I hope this won't be too 'techie' for you, if so maybe you could find someone to help, its definitely cheap !

However I haven't tried it, don't use ITunes ! (I do boot a laptop with Linux off USB with 2 partitions, just not ITunes ...)
No doubt some other more regular Linux users here will point out any flaws in my cunning plan !

Download a live CD image for a Linux distribution, get a 8GB USB stick, download YUMI. Partition the USB stick into two equal parts, one for Linux, one for music.
Using YUMI (or you could prob use unetbootin) load the Linux image to the 1st partition. This will be read-only when you boot, the other partition will be writeable.

Boot company laptop from USB stick. This won't affect the hard disk.

Get Itunes for Linux (here's a google link to get you started: http://www.google.ie/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=itunes+for+linux&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest), hopefully you can install it to 2nd partition.


Another alternative, get a 2nd hard drive, depending on the laptop, some are easy to swap.
Install Windows on that.
Maybe the company wouldn't approve of that though, but they'd never know about booting from USB !

yoyo

bonzodog2 wrote: »

I hope this won't be too 'techie' for you, if so maybe you could find someone to help, its definitely cheap !

However I haven't tried it, don't use ITunes ! (I do boot a laptop with Linux off USB with 2 partitions, just not ITunes ...)
No doubt some other more regular Linux users here will point out any flaws in my cunning plan !

Download a live CD image for a Linux distribution, get a 8GB USB stick, download YUMI. Partition the USB stick into two equal parts, one for Linux, one for music.
Using YUMI (or you could prob use unetbootin) load the Linux image to the 1st partition. This will be read-only when you boot, the other partition will be writeable.

Boot company laptop from USB stick. This won't affect the hard disk.

Get Itunes for Linux (here's a google link to get you started: http://www.google.ie/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=itunes+for+linux&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest), hopefully you can install it to 2nd partition.


Another alternative, get a 2nd hard drive, depending on the laptop, some are easy to swap.
Install Windows on that.
Maybe the company wouldn't approve of that though, but they'd never know about booting from USB !

If it's a company laptop booting from any other device is probably password protected with a bios password. Interesting workaround if not though. iTunes is quite tempermental so I wonder would it work properly with this kind of configuration.

Nimrod 7 wrote: »

Well if she's only going to use it for syncing her iPhone and nothing else then a netbook will do yeah

The one Nick mentioned looks rather good, the only possible downside I see is the fact that it only has 2 USB ports. If she will have nothing else plugged into it then it's grand.

There's this one for €10 more, it has an extra USB port but less battery life:
http://www.pcworld.ie/Product/ACER-Aspire-One-D270-Netbook/310283/2.5.0

2 USB ports are plenty for most netbooks. I would also go Asus over Acer any day of the week


Nick

Missymoohaa

Thanks guys for all your advice, a netbook I think it is so and she is definitely going to take your advice on the Asus over Acer. Really appreciate it. Techie stuff was interesting but sorry way above my head but very grateful. :cool:

Torqay

Resources are scarce on a low performance netbook with Windows 7 at only 1 GB RAM. Once you have iTunes installed, immediately uninstall Apple Software Updater (if necessary, a new version can always be installed manually) and Bonjour from the Control Panel > Programs and Features. These and other programs are installed during iTunes setup without the users consent or the option not to install them, a policy which qualifies iTunes as malware.