laptops and software

so im wondering what kind of laptop i should get for a lot of recording/music creating i might also have a few games on it, internet etc...
also, whats some good software for recording music or creating music(ie:techno)?

As far as software for techno... FruityLoops is one that has had my attention for years. I've never really gotten deep into it but essentially it is a sound tracker that you can put many samples on many tracks to create awesome drum and backing tracks, as well as techno type music.

Not sure on the laptop though.. never been a laptop person but I'd say that you're going to need a dual core (or better) processor of a mid to high range speed, with a minimum of 2GB ram and plenty of HD space. I have 1 terabyte which is a little overkill.. may be 500GB or so would be ok...

Depending on how much you can spend... I have a Dell SPX laptop as well as a desktop. The SPX is pimped up for gamers so it has an excellent graphics card, memory and processor speed. I also have Reaper running on this system for recording at jam sessions or anywhere away from home (I use Cubase SX3 on my desktop). You can download Reaper for free so that's the recording software taken care of - to be honest you need a pretty good spec to do a lot of recording otherwise you may end up with latency issues and other power related problems. SPX is the only laptop I have experience with, it's very good but I still get the best performance with a souped up desktop.

I would avoid dual-core notebooks for now; I've used a 1.6G Intel duo on a Dell notebook and its very laggy, espiecally when you're running a few applications at once. I would suggest a single-core 2.0G AMD processor (thats what I have, and I sort of prefer AMD from the get-go). I am no expert on this, but I guess that the problem with duo-core is that its hard for them to run certain programs on one processor versus the other (it seems like they can't decide which processor to run it on at one speed so they switch from one to the other, and that takes time).

Go with PC, iNotebooks suffer from the same pitfalls as all Macs... nobody really makes good applications for them as they make for PC.

My favorite recording software is WavePad, it has lots of features on it for tweaking.

Actually dual core is the way to go once the rest of the system is up to spec - you need a lot of power to get th emost out of it. Check out this particular model of The Creation Station from Sweetwater (a bit low in RAM IMO):
http://www.sweetwater.com/creation_station/cstowerpl.php