s that is as stable and useful for audio and visual apps for less cash.
For audio, afaik winXP is still being used and Vista is not trusted.
(my only experience of Vista so far is seeing it run really slowly on a machine with 'only' 1GB of RAM)
...but may be different for visuals.
Sometimes there's problems with particular interfaces on particular machines, so it's better to copy someone else's working setup if possible.
If you want to use a Firewire audio interface, then not many laptops have the larger sized firewire socket which can be used to supply power to it.
andy butler