hmmm.... $600 + $600-1k for a laptop... Hmmm... Nope... still don't have the money.

I'd be paranoid about it. If I bought one... it'd be to last YEARS. Maybe that's why I don't have the cash.

...which is one of the issues with laptops.  They often don't last years.  

If that's what you need, get one that has an accidental damage waranty option.  Dell calls it Complete Care.  It costs more, but normal waranties don't cover impacts from falls, water damage, etc.  

The other option is to low-ball it.  Buy a used machine that you can consider consumable--one cheap enough that if it croaks after 9 months it won't bother you.

Computers do not hold their value.  A three year old laptop should cost about as much as a nice cell phone.

that's why I never go for the high-end system... always shoot for the midrange and then upgrade slowly when I need to...

like I got my dell inspiron 8500 and only got the best of what I couldn't upgrade myself (UXGA Screen  )

I also got the complete care on it and that gives you piece of mind at least...

otherwise I just got the 40gig hard drive 512meg of ram and 2.4ghz processor... got it in 2004 so it was quick enough to do most taskes, and then a couple months ago I upgraded it by adding a gig of ram and when upgrading someone else's laptop for them, I got their old 60 gig hard drive...

you usually don't need too large a hard drive in the laptop, because if you're using it for music you're probably gonna wanna use an much larger external drive because the cost is much cheaper ... and just when you choose your ram try to get it in one DIMM so that when you upgrade you get more for your money... 

I know we can get carried away with laptop specs sometimes but to be honest I see some guys on the NI message board rockin Traktor with 900mhz pcs so you can definately go midrange and still go far and then in a year just get more ram which should only cost $100 as opposed to the $1k :-)

yeah in that case, if you're gonna be rockin multiple tracks with a lot of VSTi's you'll probably want to crank the ram up and a decent CPU (especially if you're gonna be running a lot of effects like reverb and reaktor)... obviously for VSTi's you won't need much in the hard drive dept because you won't be pulling from the HDD much once the vsti's are loaded... 

I'm thinking after my laptop is maxed out (or if I start doing more of my own tracks live pa style rather than djing) I will probably go with a shuttle cube pc or miniatx form factor with an lcd monitor for live pa then when I'm working with it at home, I just plug it into my kvm and do what I need to do, take it out and pack it away to play out with...

sorry to hijack this thread and take it a completely different direction but one trick I learned tonight with ableton and delays is if you select a clip w/ delay in ableton and then choose file -> render to disk and uncheck "render as loop" it will render the clip with the delay on the end of the clip (it renders the first pass on the loop), then if you do the same thing and check rendre as loop, it will render the loop with the delay on the whole thing (think of it as rendering the second pass of the loop)

then if you setup a follow action from the first rendered loop to the second rendered loop if you have two simple wavs duplicating what you would've been hearing with your vsti and effects and all that jazz.. :-)  you could do the same thing if you have an effect that goes over more bars then the clip length... like say you have an effect that doesn't repeat itself until after 16 bars and your clip is only 4 bars, you could render the first 4 bars of the clip with render as loop unchecked... then put 16 bars in the arrange view select the last 12 bars, choose render as loop and then do the same with all 16 selected... setup follow actions for the 3 seperate clips to follow eachother and then loop on the last clip...

it's a lot of work but it can definately save you a lot of cpu with some of the effects plugins out there...

TRUE!