Lewinskih01.. used pc under 500.00

I use an Asus 14 inch laptop as my music server. I use a 2 tb external USB3 hard drive for my music storage. This way the operating system is on one drive and music is on the other. My laptop uses the Intel i3 processor with 4gb of ram and a 320gb internal hard drive.

I run J Rivers Media Player and I have no problems with the set up. It is very quick accessing over 10,000 songs on the USB drive. You can shut off a lot of the Windows services which is what I did. It sounds wonderful through my Wyred4Sound Dac and the Musical Fidelity v link 192 usb/spdif converter. Actually, it sounds better than my 8,500.00 Esoteric SACD player.

Zoot, looks good to me.

Where will you store the music? A USB HDD, like Stereo5 mentions, will certainly work (I had the same configuration for a while), but remember an earlier post of mine: it's better to avoid a USB hard drive if you are going to use a USB DAC. Maybe your asus laptop has another connection other than USB and you can get a HDD with such connection? Again, USB WILL work fine, but if you are buying something then maybe you can choose for a better sounding option.

cheers!

My Asus laptop has a dedicated usb3 port and 2 usb2 ports. Never a problem and absolutely no skipping. I also have a back up of all my music on another hard drive (just in case).

Stereo5,

Sure, when I had the laptop and USB HDD holding the music I never had issues either. It never skipped nor any other issue. The problem is USB stands for universal serial bus, so all processes run in series. With data transfer, where time is not critical, it doesn't matter. But when you are streaming music (a real-time process) and in series exchanging data (the music files), it does have an impact even though the manifestation is not skipping or apparent "problems". You only realize there was something when you take it out.

This is not something to go crazy about, though. As mentioned, I had this setup and was perfectly happy. And of course there aren't many ways around music storage with a laptop. But if you can avoid it, it is better.