Has anybody had experience using soundfonts in a live situation? I have a collection of favorite soundfonts and rather than trying to convert them for use in a sampler I'm thinking about running them direct from a laptop. I realise I will need to upgrade my 333mhz Dell laptop and need some kind of midi/audio interface (I have a Layla 24/96 and Echoaudio make a PCMCIA card to suit so that's an option.)

Also what the best application for playing back soundfonts? I'm currently using Audio Compositor on my PC and while it works it seems a bit clunky. Mind you it's running on a PII 333mhz clocked at 400mz!

I would prefer to use Win2k for it's stability but Seers Reality and Bitheadz Unity DS-1 only run under Win98 etc. I'm not really interested in doing anything really fancy so I just need a reliable way of triggering the soundfonts from my Yamaha KX88. Any editing would be done at home.

As I could use a new laptop anyway this may save me from going down the sampler/sound module path.
Obviously I'll be looking at a 2ghz+ machine with at least 256meg of ram. I may also consider an external firewire 3.5" harddrive as the standard 2.5" drives tend to be on the slow side.

Basically the pro and cons of going down the above path?