I am looking to buy a laptop for live soft-synths and soft-samplers (i.e.,
NI Kontakt and Lounge Lizard, simultaneously), as well as recording. Which
of the following do you think will handle the job best? Please note, the
Dell and Gateway laptops have superior specs to the Toshiba, but does that
really mean they will outperform? I've heard bad things about both Dell and
Gateway laptops. The only downside for switching to Mac is that I would
have to get a new sequencing program (I'm a Sonar user right now) and I have
concerns about networking with my PC desktop (since I also use the PC
desktop for a significant amount of recording right now). Thanks for your
help.

I am looking at:

1) Toshiba P25
P4 3.0G processor
800 MHz system bus speed with Hyperthreading Technology
512k of L2 Cache
512MB of RAM (266Mhz), expandable to 2G
60G Hard Drive (4200rpm)

2) Gateway M675X
P4 3.0G processor
800 MHz system bus speed with Hyperthreading Technology
1M of Cache
512MB of RAM (400Mhz), expandable to 2G
60G Hard Drive (7200rpm)

3) Dell Inspiron XPS
(virtually the same as the Gateway M675X)

4) Apple G4 iBook

5) Apple PowerBook G4