Introduction
This an area I especially wanted to explore. I travel as an accompanist throughout the year and it is a toss up at times as to what condition the piano I would be playing was in.

There are other instances where there is no "acoustic" piano available and you are forced to use an electronic substitute. The range of digital piano alternatives goes from all ends of the spectrum and I wanted to find a solution using sounds that I know would work.

The links below will take you to a sort of "mini" review to give you an overview of the virtual instrument as well as some first impressions on how they performed on the S10 netbook.

TruePianos

Modartt Pianoteq

Hypersonic II

More To Come
Check back often as I am currently researching other virtual instruments and applications that might be very useful to those who are looking at using their netbooks for on the go music production.

AUDIO IN THE EXPRESS LANE
I wanted to explore the possibilities the Expresscard slot could offer as far as the audio side of things. Echo Audio a long time leader in digital audio sent me their new IOx express card interface to try out during this review. You can read the full review of the IOx by going here.

Other Tests and considerations
I also tried a few other VST plugins using Toybear's Minihost, the free version of Cantible and Simple VST host. I tried various VST plug ins I had available to see how they would perform with a wide range of results.

The key to using the S10 in live performance situations is a balance of memory management and CPU load.

With todays powerful virtual instruments maxing out the 1.6 ghz Atom CPU is very easy to do. If you are just using it to playback or record audio then you have more CPU headroom to do more things in the netbook world. Having USB 2.0 ports available opens up the possibility of being able to use large capacity external hard drives to store and record live audio as well as being able to use more powerful audio programs such as SONAR 8 to produce projects on the road and then being able to transfer them to your studio based setup.

Having only 1.5 gig of Ram is also a consideration. There is a possibility that going to 2gb of Ram (which is the highest amount the S10 can recognize) could solve some of the issues with minimizing Windows "swapping" out memory to the hard drive while trying to play a virtual instrument live.

My work on the Lenovo S10 has been promising but as with anythig that is new you are working on the cutting and sometimes bleeding edge of a new technology. The future of netbooks is promising as there are projections out there for faster and even multi-core Atom based processors so that you would not be hitting the wall when using higher powered instruments and applications.