Yes allow me to say SCREW DELL AND ALL THE PROPRIETARY RATS
if you are able to see past the falseness of their "value" you can buy ready built pc's made to use and built for use as digital audio workstations.... do not give the crappies the time of day if you are serious about music I own a toshiba lap and an hp desk, no complaints... but after I heard that Dell ...a man whom I thoughtI admired... they make you buy your ram upgrades from dell---only others won't even fit!!!!! this is communism in my opinion or the shitty way of doing things that communism was blamed for largely in this country, by mistake I might add... not that its relevant now....let me recomend just one for starters..

pcaudiolabs

and here's the one that impressed me

http://www.digitalaudiowave.com

I would be as likely to go this route as not... as I reflect.... if I had had the credit I would be making music now again instead of trying to work out the kinks out of my first new build.....
so I really donno the best route, as in from experience.. just check out the links for yourself... I know it made me almost...er well i like em', as far as appearances, go at least
luck,best,ciao

My remote setup is probably a bit higher end than what you are looking for, but it has worked wonderfully for me... I've gone with a shuttle-pc based turnkey Sequoia system. I use a Lynx2C card with an AES L-Stream on it.... It has been bulletproor for me, though.

I had it built for me by SequoiaDIGITAL.com in Hollywood (a local builder for me) and then I built my case for the monitor/keyboard/DAC-1 as a custom job myself.

http://www.sequoiadigital.com
http://photos.yahoo.com/fifthcircle2004 (photos of my rig)

In general, I'd stay away from laptops as you loose a lot of performance to get your size and weight. As long as you aren't dragging your rig on planes, etc... a shuttle is perfect. 1 real PCI slot and a full-bandwith system.

--Ben

Jbon wrote: they make you buy your ram upgrades from dell---only others won't even fit!!!!!

I've never had any problems putting third party RAM in the Dell desktops here at work. Maybe they do have that policy for notebooks (I wouldn't know either way...), but, as far as I understand, they tend to use industry standard parts, at least in their desktops. As a matter of fact, I just upgraded my co-worker's 8100 with 512 of RDRAM manufactured by Samsung, and branded by Centon. And my Dimension 4550 received 1GB of RAM (can't remember the brand, but it wasn't Dell).

History shows that computer manufacturers who use propietary hardware when OTS (off the shelf) alternatives exist have a much higher component cost and much slimmer profit margin. Just imagine how expensive propietary RAM would be.... Dell wouldn't be able to survive.

Maybe Dell will cease to support machines with third party RAM (again, I wouldn't know either way)... but I don't care, and neither does my employer.

Mark