Caltrops - Future Boy! - Laptop recommendations?

Forum Overview :: Future Boy!

by Fullofkittens 02/01/2005, 8:53pm PST

I am now in the process of putting together a rig to go and play electronic music outside of my spare bedroom... attempting to transmute myself from a oft-maligned bedroom IDM producer to a universally-despised laptop rocker.

I've got the firewire audio interface and the midi controller picked out, now what I need is a laptop. As much value for the money as I can get, of course.

Requirements:

Things that are important:
-Firewire interface. Apparently they all have this now? The Presonus Firepod is 6-pin, and apparently all laptops have 4-pin, but there are adapters. I don't *think* it's bus-powered, trying to verify this.
-do Firewire ports differ on speed?

-more USB 2.0 adapters is better than fewer (MIDI controller, ext. hard drive, mouse). 4 sounds about right.

-bigger screen is better

-support for an external monitor would be nice.

-more RAM and more speed are pretty important, since what I'm planning on doing is pretty CPU-heavy.

-I hear that heat is something I must think about. So, less heat. Pentium M processor?

Things that are not very important

-Weight. I'm not carrying this from place to place except when I'm also bringing a bunch of other shit. Heavy and huge is fine.

-Battery life. Again, the audio interface isn't bus-powered, and I can imagine very few situations I would be using it for more than 2 hours with no wall power.

So: please discuss. Brands? I have looked at Sony Vaios (the FS series is intriguing) and the Dell Warehouse store is selling some tricked out Inspirons for good prices. I've heard good things about Toshiba as well. Tech support is nice, any horror stories?

I have maybe $1500 to spend.

FoK