As far as slowing down, The need for an external synth is becoming less relevant as we move into faster processors. By the time you reach a 2 GHz machine you don't have much speed advantage with an external synth. Note that I said speed. There are other considerations, but for speed, save your money if you already have a fast processor. Dave ----- Original Message ----- From: Julie Bentley To: jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2009 15:24 Subject: RE: Laptops and hardware synthesizer for JFW I would love to hear more about synthesizers slowing down PC performance. I sure do find that my JAWS speech does not keep up with me especially when I am alt tabbing from program to program. Sorry, I have no knowledge to share with you about hardware for JAWS but would love to hear what others have to say. Julie