Recording Equipment

You can't replace your card inside your laptop, but you can use an external soundcard and override the default one.

Not sure how old this thread is, but as for the question for Vista 64 bit with a compatible interface, I would suggest the maudio fw 410 or the new m audio profire 610, both of which are vista 64 compatible.

For a laptop setup, you can either go pro with an M-Box firewire (you would require a laptop that has a pci card slot for firewire connection) or other firewire device and use Pro-Tools 8. You can go budget-pro by using either a) firewire device with Cubase 5, or a usb audio interface such as the usb mbox version or one of m-audio's many usb interfaces with Cubase 5. Logic is best for MACs, which are great, btw, as far as stability and performance, but plug ins (auto tune, guitar rig, waves, etc) are harder to find for compatibility. I personally would not suggest any other daws for a laptop based studio.

For mobile recording, I use Cubase 5 Studio, an m-audio firewire 410 into a pci firewire card. I am using a Compaq pentium dual core with 4 gb and running Vista 32bit. Works fine, gets the job done. I DJ and do live synth/electronic so I use Reason 4.0 (the propellerhead program) for synths midi controlled with a Maudio Axiom keyboard. Of course, being that it's a pc, the main thing you have to worry about are crashes at what seems like the heat of the moment.

Unless you plan on dishing out some funds for a 'professional' laptop studio setup, I wouldn't worry too much about getting high quality equipment. To meet today's ever changing industry standards, you would need a quad core laptop with at least 4gb, at least 150gb internal storage, firewire connection, a 192kz firewire device (motu, maudio profire, etc). The Alesis mastercontrol is a great interface with faders and has several ins/outs. ProTools 8 is essential for a serious recording setup.
Native Instruments Guitar Rig 3 is a guitar amp-modelling program that has a great sound to record directly in. The blue bottle series microphones are a good budget priced microphone for on the go.

Another thing to look into are the mobile 4-6 track recorders that can record directly into a wav. format. You can record a live session, then take the files to a home pc and mix them there. I know alot of people that do this and once mixed, you couldn't tell the difference.

I have an HP with Vista (64bit) that works OK. 4gb Ram, 200gb HD.
I used to just drop a mic in the middle of the room. Now I run everything through a vintage Peavey mixing board and patch the stereo output into the mic input. I capture the incoming sound with Easy Hi-Q Recorder (free). I then use Audacity (also free) to clean up the signal and add additional tracks as necessary. For that, I use Fast Track, an inexpensive USB device that allows you to hear a mix of what your doing, but isolates the incoming signal when it's recorded. You can hear some examples of both methods on my site. Comments welcome.

I agree it's a good idea to shut everything down but the recording software. Don't forget your virus scanner, IM or any other scheduled events that could pop up during recording.

For my money, I've been trying to find an inexpensive firewire mixer. A firewire mixer will stream up to 16 individual tracks to your PC and return a 2 channel mix for monitoring. So you can mix it how it sounds good to you live, but then go back later and remix everything on your PC if you want to. USB mixers only allow you to grab 2 channels at a time. NG.

All that expensive hardware and software is cool, but you still need to know how to use it and have some good audio engineering skills.
No cost - low cost - shared cost. That's my motto.

Mike