Thread Another newbie who needs lots of advice.

Hi! I'm looking to put together a little home studio setup that I can also take on the road. I'm a singer songwriter that would like to record live guitar, vocals, harmonica and use midi for drums drums, bass, piano, etc. I'm looking for better than demo quality recordings for several CD's I plan to sell at my gigs.

As for equipment, right now I have:
a Sony Vaio laptop (with 2.8G Pentium 4 processor, 512 M Ram, 60 G hard drive (partitioned), 3 USB 2 ports, 1 Firewire, 2 PC card slots, Sigma Tel soundcard),

a StudioProjects B3 condenser microphone, and

a Tascam US 122 (2 XLR inputs w/ phantom power or 2 1/4 line/guitar inputs, MIDI in and out, RCA stereo line out, Direct Monitoring) along with

a copy of Cakewalk Homestudio 2002
and the Gigastudio 24 and Cubasis VST that came bundled with the 122.

I have an additional budget of $500-1000 to get started (and am still able to return both the microphone and 122 if necessary), with additional funds becoming available at a later date; so I'd like to set up a rig that I can expand in the future without throwing too much equipment on the scrap heap.

I'm hoping to get some imput on suggested hardware and setup as well as software (which should I use and how do they all fit together).

Hopefully, I have provided enough info here to get started.

Thanks a lot,
bcaldwellmusic