CAS - new laptop sounds better

i now hv a hp probook 6460b laptop with intel core i5 processor running windows 7 64 bit pro. compared with my six-year-old toshiba, the new laptop with j river v17 connected to wyred 4 sound dac2 sounds cleaner, clearer with better separation of images.
anyone wants to share his experiences with cas using new and old laptops?

I've not directly compared old vs new laptops but I believe if you could dedicate all system resources to audio you'll hv a significant improvement - there are some freeware like asio4all, fidelizer, tcp optimizer etc that you could use to optimize things here and there..

I dont believe processing power is necessary for good sound; the less stuff you hv running in the background, the better.. like the much raved Bryston using a barebones Taiwan Alix board with decade+ old AMD chip.. apparently can still sound very good; dedicated/well thought thru power supply and Linux software optimization are its tricks..

dont need i5 for 2 channel audio lah.. i'm also using i5; but believe a simple atom based netbook would do.. since netbooks are out of favor perhaps can get a used one and dedicate it for audio. Stop all services except audio ones.. then maybe get the current cream of the crop player, Jplay, to realize the PC's full potential.