Need a recommendation on a portable music machine

[finger]

Hey there!

A friend of mine just asked me to find him a good laptop he can do audio editing (sound forge, fruity loops etc.) on. I'd guess he's needing something with good audio in/out and probably a burner integrated.
Thanks!

-finger

 

[bluemax]

It **has** to be a laptop? Only problem with laptops is their hard drives are generally slower than a desktop machine.
If you absolutely have to go with a laptop instead of a small microATX mini, mini setup (barely larger than a BookPC but takes full-sized PCI cards for a pro audio recording card...)
... you CAN get pro audio gear with an external breakout box that plugs into a PCMCIA slot. EgoSys and MIDIman are great places to start there, but the laptop stuff comes at a premium and you're still hampered by the slow hard drive speeds...

 

[finger]

yeah, he really wants a laptop because he's going to New Zealand and needs something to store and process audio and video. He's looking at some macintosh stuff now.
thanks for the input!