so my laptop died,

[surfmaster]

and my parents gave me $500 to spend on a new one. i'm a college student so i really dont have much more money to put into this. i already have a desktop that works fine for my mixing needs but i was thinking that it would be nice to track with my laptop onto an external hard drive that i have already and just plug the hard drive back into my desktop when i want to mix. i use reaper so i can just run that on both machines. i'm using the tascam fw-1804.

would these be good enough to handle tracking 8 tracks simultaneously?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834101073
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8534044&productCategoryId=abcat0502003&type=product&tab=2&id=1186008220129#productdetail


how bad is it really if it only has 512kb of L2 cache?
how would i find out what kind of firewire chipset is in it? (i know i want a texas instruments one)

thanks for any help or recomendations!

 

[yoyo]

well, it has a firewire port, but i don't know what chipset. you'd have to go to www.gateway.com and search around for thei laptop's specs

Your one problem might be that it runs vista not XP. otherwise it looks very nice, especially with the 1 gig of DDR2 for the money