Hey everyone. I wanted to share my experience with the Razer Blade Stealth ultrabook with you guys. For reference, before testing the Stealth I have been DJing with a mid-2012 MacBook Pro, 15-inch non-Retina unibody running OS X Yosemite. My hope with testing the Stealth was that I could replace my MBP with a much more portable laptop, try out Windows 10 after using OS X for so long, and have a significantly less expensive option for a DJ laptop.

This is the Razer Blade Stealth - www.razerzone.com
It features an Intel Skylake processor, a 12.5" QHD touchscreen (2560 x 1440 pixels), 8 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD, USB-C charging, 2 USB 3.0 ports, and an HDMI port.

As an ultrabook, this thing is great. It's incredibly thin and light, very fast, and it looks really cool. Unfortunately, I didn't have a lot of luck using it for DJing with Serato DJ.

The QHD screen, which looks amazing when watching videos and browsing the web, made it very difficult to use Serato DJ, and scaling did not help. I did find a hack to force it to scale correctly, but Serato's GUI is not optimized for high-res screens (yet), so the interface didn't look great even with the scaling hack. This could of course be remedied if Serato released an update to SDJ with support for high-res displays. The touchscreen didn't bring any advantages to Serato DJ; I had hoped that I could drag and drop tracks with my finger, or tap-to-drag from one deck to another to instant double, but SDJ wouldn't let me do that, and the high resolution made dragging and dropping tracks with a finger cumbersome and not practical.

I noticed a strange issue when using Serato DJ in offline mode. There was a very noticeable delay between hitting a key (ex. cue point) and the audio response. Luckily this didn't happen when hardware was connected, but when offline there was always about a 0.2 second delay between pressing a cue point key and hearing the track jump to that cue point.

Now the big issue - I experienced two system freezes while using the Stealth with a Pioneer DDJ-SX, and one of those times was at a gig. I wasn't able to determine if this was a Windows 10 issue (I optimized all settings as recommended by Serato), or a drivers issue (all drivers were updated to the latest versions), but it made me lose faith that this was a dependable machine for stable live DJ performance. The system also froze a couple of times when Serato DJ wasn't running, and I couldn't figure out why. I also tested with a Pioneer DJM-S9 and turntable setup, and I didn't experience a system freeze. Again, I wasn't able to nail down the cause of the freezes, and it seemed to occur randomly, regardless of what I was doing on the laptop.

One cool feature is the RGB keyboard. Each key can be lit individually with a different color. I created a keyboard profile where the keys were lit to match Serato DJ's functions - keys 1-5 were lit red for Deck 1's cue points, keys 6-0 were lit blue for Deck 2's cue points, different colors for censor, the shift key, control key, etc. It was like having one of those keyboard covers with the shortcuts printed on it. It looked cool in a dark club, and I could set it to automatically load when I opened Serato DJ.

Coming from the MacBook Pro I've used for years, I didn't have much trouble adapting to Windows 10, but I just like OS X (soon to be macOS) better. It's just a better experience IMO - fewer settings to tweak, no drivers to install and constantly update, fewer invasive/annoying notifications and system popups, no worries about viruses/malware, and as a computer in general, everything in the Apple ecosystem just works so well together. Yes, El Capitan was a disaster for Serato DJ, but I never upgraded. This is personal preference; I'm just more comfortable using Apple's OS with both DJing and everyday computing.

Conclusion - I really like the Razer Blade Stealth as an ultrabook for everyday web browsing, watching movies, streaming music, etc., but I wasn't happy with it as a DJ laptop. I had high hopes for it, especially with how portable and awesome-looking it is. But the multiple system freezes, the lack of SDJ support for its high-res touchscreen, and the unimpressive Windows 10 experience has convinced me to stick with Apple for DJing.

I hope you guys found this review informative and helpful.