pc drive ???

[OOG]

i'm a Mac guy but a friend is giving me a 2yr old Dell laptop with a shot hard drive
otherwise it's in really good shape and loaded
should i get a 7200 rpm or a 5400 rpm drive for it?
slower power consumption would be a + i don't want it to be noisy

is there a very simple interface for recording
liks a pc garageband?

[bdegrande]

Ideally, you should use an external hard drive for recording, so it won't compete with the drive that's running the programs, operating system, etc. A 7200 RPM drive is better for recording, so if you only have one drive, that might be the way to go. Maxing out memory is always good for recording.

The downside of 7200 RPM drives is that they run hotter and shorten battery life. I use a 5400 RPM internal and a 7200 RPM external. Externall dtives are very cheap - 500GB for $100 is not unusual.

There are lots of PC recording programs in every price range from free on up. I have only used a few, but I haven't found anything that comes close to Garageband in terms of ease of use, special features for podcasting, etc. I'll leave this one to people who have used more PC recording software than I have. There are certainly more powerful recording packages, as there are on the Mac.

[dkaplowitz]

If you can get 7200 RPM it's worth it for the performance, IMO. I have a 5400 RPM in my 2-3 year old Inspiron and it's pretty noisy too, so unless you're really crazy about sound, and willing to pay for an extra quiet drive, you're going to put up with some whirring from the thing. Next to RAM, putting in a faster drive is probably one of the best performance increases you can do to a PC...better by far than a couple of hundred Mhz. from a CPU.