As I'm going away to university next year (The Tonmeister course at Surrey, if people know of it?) I'm wanting to get a laptop to do a little bit of music related stuff on. Mainly I'll probably just use it for word processing but it'd be nice to be able to use it for some audio work.

Since I'm looking for something as cheap as possible (it's coming as a late 17th birthday present from my parents ) I'm thinking of getting a custom built one to avoid having to pay for things I don't need, so really I'd like to know of any good vendors for tailoring a PC towards audio and also what makes of soundcard are good lowend to midrange price. Thanks in advance!

edit: and yes I did search, and I didn't find any recent topics relating to the first question!