So I'm looking at buying a laptop, and have a max of $1000 to spend on it. I have narrowed a lot of options down, and need some answers to this question:

For running a DAW program like Cakewalk's Sonar, would having an Athlon Turion 64 (not dual-core) with 4GB of RAM work better than having a similar clock speed, similar FSB Athlon Turion 64 X2 with only 2GB of RAM? Would the better processor or the better RAM suit me better?

Best Buy is running specials on some notebooks, and I can get the 4GB, 2.0 Ghz Turion Acer for about the same price as the 2GB 2.0 Ghz Turion X2 Toshiba...

I'll mention that I won't be recording a lot of tracks simultaneously, but will be running a few software plugins - BFD, a few virtual instruments, WAVES plugins... Maybe up to 8 or 10 tracks. both hard drives are quite large (I think around 160 GB @ 5400) but I have two external drives that I can run samples / save tracks on.

Thoughts?

To the user (William F) that posted:

"Audio is sampled at 44khz for stereo quality

any computer can handle that even an old 233 Mhz pentium"

I'm talking about multi-tracking, here, not playing a CD, in addition to running virtual software synthesizers. And I can sample at up to 192 khz for all of these tracks. My Athlon 3000+ with a Gig of RAM can barely handle what I throw at it in a DAW setting.

Are you sure you understand my question?