Lewinskih01.. used pc under 500.00

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.

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).

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!

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.

Thank you for advice... I hope I explained correctly that the Asus 16" will be used with my main system and a used HP, Lenovo or something like that , for shopping (Amazon) etc.

Absolutely yes. If I'm understanding you correctly, you'll use this laptop for the tasks you mentioned and connected to your DAC for everyday use, and use an "audiophile computer" (sounds funny, doesn't it?) connected to your DAC for serious listening.

It looks like a sound way of making sure everything other than playback stays away from your audiophile server. The only music coming out from the laptop, it seems, would be streaming radio. Don't know what software you'll use for that. I can't help there as I use a Squeezebox Touch for that purpose. But it might be more practical to just have that software in your audiophile server and avoid the connecting/disconnecting piece. Once you have it running in the laptop, let's see how resource intensive this is, and if it can be easily turned off completely. Still, having another computer for ripping, downloading, etc is a good idea in my book.

BTW, did I pointed you already to the Guide to Ripping CDs? There are surely other good ways of ripping, but this has the benefit of a well written guide to walk you through.

Nice to see you making progress!!