Anyway, my wife already got a Studio 1537 as a replacement thinking the Inspiron 6400 was toast (which is it) and only a chance enquiry about an issue with the Studio 1537 (cats ate the power chord, so we needed a replacement, complete care warranty covered that) led to us talking about the fried computer.
So my wife allowed me to have the XPS1530, given my laptop is 5 years old. It(the XPS) has pretty decent specs, Nvidia 8600 graphics w/ 256 mb ram, 4 GB dual channel DDR, and Core2Duo T8100 @ 2.1 Ghz with a 320 GB HDD. (way better than the Inspiron 6400) and Vista Extreme edition SP1 (32 bit).
I wasn't expecting much out of it as an audio laptop, with it's inbuilt Sigmatel audio, crappy Ricoh firewire chipset and 5400 rpm HDD. Well, the firewire is definately not up to the TI firewire chipset I had in my last laptop, but it does work at least, needed some tweaking and my Alesis IO14 has to run a buffer or 2 higher than it did on the last computer on it's TI chipset. But surprisingly, I found the 5400 drive (sata) to be faster than the 7200 rpm ide drive in my old laptop, and it performed really well. And the Sigmatel audio, when used with ASIO4ALL, actually rocks, for playback at least ! At 256 samples, I could get it to play back 14 live clips simultaneously - no track freezing - (some very intensive, racked with 4 parts, or various FX), a couple of sends and have the Live CPU meter (asio buffer) only be at 36-41% which was amazing. On my old computer, I would probably have frozen 9 or 10 tracks and the CPU meter would have been at 55-60% and I may have stepped up latency to 384 or 512 samples. But the sound was great and the computer was easily handling this load. So this upgrade as well as being lucky as hell, is working nicely - with Live 7.0.16 Suite at least !!!
