Ken,

I've been through this journey for topic 1, two times in the past 7 years. First time I bought an IBM Thinkpad Z61m, because it was one of the few laptops that I could confirm had the Texas Instruments firewire chipset which PreSonus eventually said was nearly necessary to make their Firewire interfaces work properly.

It lasted less than 5 years before the mobo gave out. It was $1000+ in roughly 2007 time frame. 5 years out and the replacment mobos were incredibly rare and expensive. Cheaper to buy a new laptop.

I have used T-series ThinkPads from IBM for very durable and reliable USB based audio recording at work - bashing them in and out of automobiles (not intentionally of course) for connection to binaural dummy heads. I thought the IBM choice was a no-brainer as a result.

The reality is, there are very few laptop manufacturers globally. It's probably less than 5 manufacturers making laptops for 95% of all brands.

Here's what to really look out for - after going through these efforts again about 3 years ago:

Make sure that the processor is up to the task. Many of the $300-$500 range laptops are using pretty crummy processors. AMD has a line of processors (I think it's the E series) that are not worth the powder to blow them up as it pertains to audio production.

On the intel side, I would recommend Core i3 and above, whatever the latest configurations are. Intel has made it quite confusing with all of the different processor lines they now offer, with features enabled/disabled, etc.

CPUBenchmark is your friend here: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/

I learned the AMD E-series lesson the hard way with a cheapo Toshiba that couldn't run the software that the Core Duo Thinkpad did 5 years previous. Office Depot/Max/Staples sell these and it's best to avoid them, IMO. Here's the latest flavor $250 - probably can't run BIAB: http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/35...140202_20140209

CPU Benchmark is 605 on that one. Pretty low.

Took the one I had bought back to the store, and then got wise to the fact that the E-series in that box was seriously weak for audio. Bought a refurbished Samsung for about $50 more with a Core i3 that doesn't even break a sweat doing all kinds of live VSTi/VST processing in my DAW software.

Memory went bad about a year ago on the Samsung, but swapped it and no issues since.

Look for faster hard drive speeds, and a CPU benchmark that is reasonable - again, these days I would look at Corei3 performance and look for scores higher than that. It also helps if your music software can actually make use of multiple cores.

As for #2, sorry can't help out there. My guess is that good performance for #2 would go along with good performance for #1.

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