I am planning on buying a laptop for school right around boxing week, and am setting aside a budget of $150 (preferably less) to get some sort of input hardware to help along with its audio processing. I am a both a gamer and a musician, so I am looking for something that's a jack-of-all-trades kinda deal that's hopefully easy to use (perhaps a plug and play device), and will be able to actually help along the performance of game audio and enhance whilst taking enough load off the CPU so that there are noticable framerate and audio lag improvements. It would be awesome if I could plug in a guitar or a mic into it as well and be able to launch Ableton or Protools or anything I might be using at the time for some recording with clarity and again smooth performance. All of this needs to fit into a laptop via either USB or HDMI. Let's not look at firewire options in the meantime because I'm not sure whether or not the laptop would have it, since I am not sure about the model that I'm buying.
Much appreciation and thanks in advance!
