Below I quote what Nemesys says about laptops in their FAQ. Despite the negative answer, I would not be discouraged from trying a laptop, at least with an external harddisk. There must be at least one PMCIA soundard by now, and some laptops have built in sound. There is a PMCIA UW SCSI available. Also, there are firewire interfaces and disks available. So what if 500MHz laptops are slower than their like rated desktops. As long as they are fast enough. Also, I bet many laptops allow power management to be turned off, at least when the laptop is coupled to AC.
On the other hand, the lunchbox computers recommended by Nemisis at
www.bsicomputer.com may be an attractive option is an external harddisk is not desired.
There is another laptop option to consider: while it may seem to defeat the main feature of gigasampler, one could load samples into RAM. For example, the 150 MB GM library would fit into a high-end laptop's RAM.
Clif
"Q: Do you recommend a laptop for portable use?
A: Notebook\laptop computers are generally not recommended for running the GigaSampler. They tend to perform slower than their desktop counterparts of the same advertised speed. The miniaturization plays a part in slowing things down. Due to lack of readily available PCMCIA soundcards, the audio output on laptop computers doesn’t compare either. The power management will also cause major problems.
There are two recommended options for portability. Portable computers and Rackmount systems."