I am looking into purchasing Virtual Drumline and Kompakt to use with Finale 04. A buddy of mine showed me some stuff he did and I was floored. I know you guys kind of push Sibelius, but I am a 12 year user of FInale and am happy with what it does. I want to set it up on my laptop. I have a basic Dell laptop, Pentium 3, WIndows 98, CD burner, nothing fancy. Any reason why I could/would not want to install VD and Kompakt on my Dell laptop as opposed to my home rig? I already purchased the Oxygen8 keyboard and love it. No problems with that and my laptop and Finale so far. Tell me if you see me running into any problems with my laptop set-up.

The main thing that I'd warn against with this type of setup (on your laptop) is the possibility of limited RAM. While Kompakt advertises its minimum requirements will allow for a Pentium 3 with 256K RAM, once you load a fair amount of decent samples, in addition to running other MIDI programs, it can begin to tax your system. I'm not saying it won't work...but with an older/slower system, with limited memory, there may be the potential for problems. Dealing with sample playback actually requires a lot of resources from your hardware, so more ram on a faster machine is always better.

Kompakt will allow you to authorize it on two machines, so there's no reason you couldn't have it on both your laptop as well as your home rig.