Do you have the skills/inclination to build one yourself? If so it can be fairly cheap.
In regards to EAC, the CPU intensive task is the encoding. Ripping itself is easy and is constrained by the optical drive - optical drives in laptops are notoriously poor. The current encoding champ is the Intel Core 2 Duo. I have an E6600 and it's incredible - FLAC at -8 (maximum compression) and LAME -V 6 one after the other - both tasks combined at THIRTY SECONDS per track! This is more than twice as fast as my retired Pentium 4 2.8 GHz and four times as fast as the AMD Duron 1.2 GHz in my secondary PC. Core 2 Duos have come down in price and you can get the low-end ones for not all that much. Motherboards for this can be pricey but I'm using an economical ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA - the nice thing about it is that you can reuse your old DDR RAM and your old AGP card. But if you don't want to build a PC yourself, the lower-end Dells ought to do. If you can find one with an entry level Core 2 Duo you'd be all set. As long as you go for a desktop you'll get a better optical drive than you would with a laptop, so you would be covered there as well. -- Mark Lanctot 'Sean Adams' Response-O-Matic checklist, patent pending!' (http://forums.slimdevices.com/showpost.php?p=200910&postcount=2) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Lanctot's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2071 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=35510 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
