Thinkpads Forum

Hi,
I couldn't find a thread on the topic, and as I am in need of a laptop for music, I thought I'd post one.

Basically, I'm looking for the best Thinkpad to run Ableton Live and all of the equipment I throw at it. Running the program should be easy enough on any machine, but I feel there may be some strain when trying to connect lots of accessories. For instance, I would be connecting at least an extra HD, along with a portable sound card, preferably via Firewire. Also via Ableton, I will be running various virtual instruments via VSTs and Refills. I would need this all to happen in real-time, so I think I'm looking for a laptop with tons of processing power, and most importantly, reliability.

Of course, it would be nice to use the internet every once in a while, but I feel that has a such a negligible effect on today's machines it's not worth worrying about. Could be wrong, though.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask, or suggestions, feel free to help.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: I should also mention that battery life is not an issue, as this will almost always be connected to an outlet.

A friend of mine uses an old Sony Vaio with 1GHz CPU, 512MB ram, W2000, and on it he hangs an external 500GB USB disk with thousands of songs. He uses the internal sound, fed into an amp.
Don't know his DJ software though, but he uses it every weekend.
He knows nothing about computers, but it works for him.
In other words, you don't need a very fancy laptop to play Disc Jockey.

If you're running the latest version, you'll need (according to their site):

Windows: 1.5 GHz CPU or faster, 512 MB RAM (1 GB recommended), Windows XP or Windows Vista, Windows compatible sound card (ASIO driver support recommended), QuickTime 6.5 or higher, DVD-ROM drive

So you'd probably do well to look at an R5x at the lowest, or an R6x or Z series. These all have a Firewire port, and probably enough CPU power/RAM upgradeability to handle what you need.

Naturally, if you have a less recent version, your requirements may be slightly lesser, however I'd say that the models I've listed would be more worthwhile than anything earlier that has Firewire built in.