Thats a great laptop with great specs, super usabillity and Dell service.

Having the tablet function on it makes it easy to use in live situations if you ever wanted to (touchscreen) or just on the bench for browsing the forums as a tablet, while still having decent QWERTY keys.. However for a music setup with laptop on a stnd, this works perfect as a tablet, on the bench on your lap its a tiny bit heavy and needs to rest on your lap (but so would any other laptop) all in all i personally like this formfactor.

A quadcore is only faster if the software is written to use the extra Cores, most of the professional Music software like DAWs and VSTs uses the extra Cores and gives you extra performance.. However for the way you intend to use it a dual core might work to..

For images Acronis is great, however there is also a lot of freeware software thats just perfect for making images of windows 10 and does not cost money. Make sure to not make the image on your local SSD. If that fails the image is gone to. In the LINK is information about system backups in Windows 10


The audio interface i advised was a focusrite Scarlet Solo, its $99 and tested as best.
It does not have physical midi, as in 5pin DIN connectors. However there are other interfaces that have that to.