I just bought a refurbished HP dv6t-7000 (with HP refurb warranty) for $795 on ebay. It's an amazing laptop -- more powerful than the two quad-core desktops I use for composing, recording and mixing music (I use, primarily, Sonar X2, Finale, and Audition 3.0 and CS6). It's an Intel i7 machine, 2.
3 GHz hyper-threaded CPU that scales up to 3.1 GHz as the load requires. BluTooth, WiFi (b/g/n) and WiDi. It has a 15" 1920 x 1080 screen, lighted keyboard (very handy for use in a dark room), and came with 8 gig of RAM and a 9-cell battery good for around 6 hours. I also picked up a 6-cell battery because I travel on planes a lot. I dropped another $120 on RAM and expanded it to its maximum of 16 gig. It had a reasonably fast 750 gig hard drive, but I replaced it with a 512 gig SSD, which improves its battery life and makes it really speedy. It will support an additional mSSD, but I haven't bothered to put one in -- some people use it for caching the HD. It has a full keyboard, including a separate numeric keypad. It's got 3 USB 3.0 ports and 1 USB 2.0 port, VGA and HDMI jacks, and a slot for SDHC cards. No 1394/Firewire port, though, if you're planning on use a Firewire interface. It came with a DVD R/W, but I'm replacing it with a Blu-Ray R/W. It has Beats audio, but I consider that fluff. Its built-in speakers do sound less tinny than a usual laptop, and it can go lots louder, but when I'm doing music with it I use headphones. I don't play computer games, but it is, apparently, a good machine for a gamer -- it has two graphics cards and switches intelligently between them when there are heavy graphics demands. I have used it on the road to play HD movies by connecting it to the hotel's LCD television via HDMI, and to watch my Slingbox. Total weight is around 5 lbs.
This machine is lightning fast and runs all of my music software (and everything else, including Adobe Premiere CS4) with ease. I use an
mAudio Fast Track Ultra with it (I use a Fast Track Ultra and a Fast Track Ultra 8r on my two desktops) and
a Korg nanoKontrol2 control surface. I use it for music primarily for recording at my writing partner's house -- I'll transfer an Audition-based project to it and record vocals through the Fast Track Ultra, then transfer the vocal tracks back to my mixing machine when I get home. It's over-powered for that purpose, but has the capability of doing anything I can do with my home machines with ease. It's also pretty rugged. I used to have
Sony VAIO laptops, but they always wound up falling apart, were rather flimsy and, frequently, had fit-and-finish issues. The HP feels and looks solid. This is, far and away, the best machine I've ever owned (and I've owned many laptops since 1989).
