Newbie questions before buying!

Hi All,

I'm new here and hoping you can help me with some basic questions before I part with my hard earned cash!

I like the look of the V-studio 20 alot and would intend to use it to record fairly simple guitar based music - one or two guitar tracks, bass track, couple of vocal tracks and drums provided by loops.

The guitars & bass will be either recorded with on board effects or with a mic on a small combo. So no huge orchestral projects or virtual instruments........

The first question is will this really run well with no latency on a netbook - I have a basic netbook with windows xp 32 bit - 1 gig ram and a N270 processor giving 1.6ghz. I know the web site say's this is fine - but I've had bad experience of latency before and don't want to be driven to distraction again. Is anybody else running a similarly basic system and can you report back on how well it works?

I understand that I can direct monitor the hardware affects, but when I have tried this previously with a zoom H4 (again hardware effects in the unit)  there was still a noticeable time lag between the guitar track and the backing track, even though there was no latency in the direct monitored signal when recording - of course this may have been user error, incorrect use of the system or just plain old crappy drivers / bad integration from zoom I guess!

With regard to the drum loops - I read a post on here that said I can't use ezdrummer - are other commercially available loops compatible? I'd prefer audio loops to midi - so something like drums on demand where I can just drop loops in to construct a song then add bass & guitars.

Next up, is that if I upgrade the basic guitar tracks that is included to pro 4 or even sonar, they have significantly higher requirements from my little pc - if I am using the VS 20 for hardware effects will the netbook still run GT Pro 4 or Sonar - ie is the higher requirement to running the larger program, or to allow use of extras like the included Amplitude LE?

I will buy a better PC / macbook pro at some point, I just don't want to yet!

I have tried to see if these questions have been asked before & couldn't find them - so hopefully I'm not going over the same old ground.

Thanks in advance.

Neil