Obviously it’s brilliant at your basic email checking/running office apps/browsing web or watching youtube but can it run a DAW? Yes actually and for what’s on offer it actually does a fine job. I tested it out with Cubase and most tasks ran pretty smoothly. The more power hungry VI’s out there may give a system like this a little bit of a hard time but this machine will handle a lot of what most novices and newcomers require of it. I imagine a lot of those expensive power hungry plugins aren’t going to be available at first to most newcomers (seeing as the computer is only one part of the puzzle i think it’s reasonable to say their money is better spent elsewhere rather on more plugins). To be fair it ran better than I was expecting it to and it makes me wonder how well it would perform in other studio responsibilities…did someone say a small plugin server?