HP 8570W specs for Cubase 7

I have extensive travel plans for the next year and I’m planning to buy one of these. I don’t plan to haul my major equipment around no guitars, blue tooth speakers not real monitors. I’ll record analog and mix at home, just want to compose on the road with midi plugins, small keyboard and a decent mic , USB Audio/Midi Interface. My big plugins are Halion Sonic, Toontrack Superior and 3 kits, Guitar Rig 5 and a few little extras. I just want it to work smoothly with some headroom to spare.

Three questions I hope someone can answer:

  1. I am comfortable with Win 7. Is Win 8 better/worse/a headache and does it present a significant learning curve?

  2. Is 8GB RAM sufficient for this application?

  3. Is i5 good or is the significantly pricier i7 necessary?

Keep in mind that this is a tool and I don’t aspire to own the latest and greatest anything.

Thanks, and Keep Cubasing

JWS

the i5 would be fine if you’re not wanting to use lots of halion sonics synths and then mix with heavy cpu plugins like slate’s consoles and tapes. the good thing with the HP elitebooks is you can change the cpu yourself if you want, I bought a cheap i5 machine and replaced it with the top quad i7 bought from ebay.

8 gig of ram will be fine, same as above, you can change it later easily, I went to 16 gigs.

you can also,like myself, swap out the optical drive for another hard drive very easily so you can have a separate drive for your audio/samples.


windows 8 is fine, I have it now on all my machines, takes a few weeks to get your head round the two different ‘spaces’; metro apps and desktop apps. My new DAW is working fantastic with win 8 x64 and Cubase 7 x64.