About to purchase, hardware recommendations

[theprep]

I've considered Live 8 with the APC 40, but Usine keeps me interested. I have been researching the Dell 15z with i7/8GB RAM, do you recommend anything else, I believe it was suggested some time back a touchscreen? My end goal is live performance along the vein of Tycho, BOC, Flying Lotus. My background is heavy in MIDI, so I am quite use to programming in a piano scroll, but would like a control surface of some sort to trigger samples, effects and time changes.

[gurulogic]

I strongly suggest a touch screen, at very least dual touch, more if possible. I use a a lenovo X220t tablet with dual touch and i5 cpu as one suggestion. Usine with a touch screen is a highly versatile control surface but it can never hurt to have another device with a few knobs etc. The piano scroll in Usine is a bit on the basic side by itself but if you have the patience to learn the program you can can build all kinds of very elaborate ways to interface and generate midi!