Laptop Live Recording

[Rag]

I am moving out and going to university soon so i'm going to have to leave the majority of my studio behind. However I would like to take a small location recording setup with me based around my laptop.

The laptop specs are:

P4 2.66 Ghz
512Mb RAM
40Gb Internal HDD

Currently in my studio I have:

AMD 64 3400+
1Gb Ram
120GB Program Drive
120GB Audio Drive

RME Fireface 800
Soundcraft M12

Various mics etc..

I was thinking of adding a fireWire HDD, racking up my Fireface 800 and upgrading the laptop a little bit. 1 or 2Gb of RAM and a Firewire HDD.

The problem is that I would like to also be able to use the laptop for ordinary surfing/word processing as well as working on my own material using Sonar/Reason. Could I do this without dual-booting? Is it even possible to boot from a firefire drive? Could i use the firewire drive for recording audio as well as for storing samples? or should I get two smaller firewire drives?

All the material will probably be taken back to the studio for mixing, this set up is only going to be used for live recording/working on simple song ideas while I am away etc...

Also, after upgrading the laptop, I would like to upgrade my setup to be able to record more tracks at once. As the fireface has 2 ADAT i/o's, could anyone reccomend a decent 16 chan Analog > ADAT converter. I was thinking of getting an Alesis HD24 and just using it for its converters, which i hear are ok, and then a 16 chan mixer for pres. Would also allow me to record onto the standalone unit as a backup incase the laptop is having a bad day...

Anyways, if you made it this far, thanks for reading!

As always, I appreciate any replies, and am open to new ideas/suggestions regarding my situation.

Thanks in advance,

Rag

 

[Hard2Hear]

Just depends on how good your laptop really is.

I use a Toshiba with better numbers than yours, but some are better than others outside of the numbers. If it runs well and handles everyhting fine you will have no problem. I use a MOTU 828mkII and have recorded 10 in on a 24 track song while I had 2 Mozilla browser windows open and was running Yahoo messenger. I do everything under one profile on XP and have zero issues ever with mine. I do use a fast external USB2 HD. I didnt want a FW drive cause I wanted to keep that free for the MOTU only.

H2H

 

[Polaris20]

I dual boot on my desktop, but not on my laptop. And right now all I have set up is my laptop since we're cramped in a little apartment for the time being. It's working fine, and mine's WAY slower than yours.