Cell, this is mainly good advice from element, with a few caveats.
yea foo, your computers definitely alright. i'm running the same exact. t7100 hp centrino duo w/ 2 gigs of ram. i use protools all day w/ little to no lag and thats probably the biggest test to pass. the trick to a laptop is having a fast harddrive. all you need to do is upgrade to a 7200rpm harddrive, which you can get a 320gb for 90$ online. definitely reccomend it.
Unless you are recording 8+ tracks of audio concurrently, which I doubt, you wont *need* to upgrade to a faster HD.
It will help, and hard drives are dirt cheap these days, so if you have the £ lying around, look into it.
well before that you NEED to upgrade your soundcard. you get hindered compltely unless you have it.
Very true.
it eliminates all the lag (5ms) from midi recording.
two areas where latency will affect you:
1) the time it takes for you to hear a sound after triggering it (eg via MIDI). If that time is too long you cant play naturally
2) Monitoring live signals (eg listening to your vocals in a heaphone mix whilst tracking)
Both have exactly the same root cause and would be solved with the new audio interface.
AND it takes some of the workload off your pc trying to process everything.
Unless you have a completely DSP based audio platform (e.g. ProTools HD) then your processor will still be processing all the audio.
The difference will be in the drivers. Well written ASAIo drivers are far more efficient and hence require less overhead on your CPU.
so i'd recomend getting just a $200 dollar fast track pro so you can get pt m-powered up and running and it comes w/ 2 inputs.
If you really want to use PT M-Powered then its an acceptable option, but other lower end DAW packages are far less crippled than PT M-Powered or PT LE.
M-Audio hardware generally sucks balls, and their drivers arent the most stable.
so w/ 300$ you have a dope setup and your ready to go. if you have a firewire input in your laptop, get the firewire410. its decent and the bandwith is a lot more stable than any usb can offer.
Bandwidth and stability are completely unrelated here.
By the way, USB2 has more bandwidth than FW400, and at this level you wont notice much difference in performance or stability all other things being equal (i.e. driver support).
Stay away from any USB1 audio interfaces tho. USB1 bandwidth is many orders of magnitude less than FW400 or USB2 and you will almost certainly find bottlenecks here
but thats jjust me.. i do a lot of recording vocals and stuff so I need the extra bandwith, but if your just dropping beats you really don't need anything but an usb soundcard. cop one off of craigslist, no specific brand needed. i'm sure you can get one for less than $75 easyy. all it needs to be is asio-compliant and your setttt
USB2 or FW400 - stay away from USB1 altogether.
And importantly not all ASIO drivers are created equally....
As per my last post, if you let me know your budget for an interface, Ill recommend a few that I know from first hand experience will work well for you.