Building a Laptop for Audio

Hey folks, I have a techie inquiry: I want a laptop for the simple reason of portability. I don't have a real space per se, and I'd like to have the benefit of Reaper and an editor on-site if I record a gig. Also there are cool spaces to use, and with a rigged-for-bear laptop I can take advantage of this kind of thing. I don't need a starship, just a capable machine that can handle a 4-in interface with a stereo out. Maybe I'll stick Cool Edit and T-Racks in there too. How would you outfit such a machine, or which one commercially available would you use? Thanks!

The single biggest thing in my experience is the amount of noise the laptop generates. The one I'm using at the moment is so horrendously noisy it's unbelievable. I wouldn't have thought, for example, that a laptop could send fatal amounts of noise through the USB ports, but this one does. It's so noisy I can't even use it for Skype, much less any audio applications.

I'll probably be using it for pretty low0stress stuff, recording no more than 4 at a time, small no's of tracks. Smart use of 'verb, etc. But, thanks for the replies- this is all very enlightening and helpful! Cool, I'll keep all this in mind.

imho budget laptops suck for audio. too many probs with them. i test too many for friends. like poor fw chips n lousy internal hard drives. run dpc latency checker befor buying one. if you must go this route stick a 7200 rpm drive with 32 mb cache in an enclosure n hook it up to the laptop (external) to record to n run tests. only laps i'd suggest people look at (but will cost..) are adkproaudio.com..cos these are built for pro audio work. ti chipset etc.

TI equipped laptop are getting harder and harder to find as days go by. Even ADK had to resort to using and selling VIA equipped laptop which, while I trust they tested them and they work satisfactorily in most conditions, is still a cause for concern.

Try one of these maybe?

Or these guys:

Not looking good. Might be a desktop after all.

Upon reciept of a few minutes to spare I'll give that a more thorough read, thanks 'shark.

I'm using a very cheap 4 year old Acer 1360 laptop with a Saffire Pro26 for location recording. Most of the time it works fine but occasionally I'll have ground loop problems. That's where the Saffire's ADAT interfaces come in handy as I can use an external box like the Behringer ADA8000 via ADAT and solve the ground loop issues. Cheers James.