Well, you can always use the Roland SC-55mkII with a serial cable (if your laptop has one) with a USB sound card, but that's an external module..
I looked into this back when I was using a laptop as my DAW.. I would probably go with a Creative card with soundfonts, now that soundfonts are largely freeware.
If the laptop is good enough, you may look into any soundcard and using sample instruments like VSTi's or better.
More like the USB is the trend for audio cards now (look at Creative or Terratec), but no website is telling you if hardware MIDI playback is available or they rely on Windows GS Wavetable
Something to be aware of is that unlike the 90's and early 00's, sound cards for modern computers rarely have a wavetable MIDI synth on board, or at least, much less commonly. There tends to be 3 kinds of soundcard in the sub $200 category, semi-pro like the M-Audio, EMU, etc, the mid-tier allround, like the Turtle Beach cards, and the budget, which have no real brand and cost 10 bucks and advertise "digital support" or "HD sound" or something similar. They usually pass digital signal fine, but suck for anything else.
But anyway, typically only the "mid-tier" cards have any onboard MIDI synth. Obviously Turtle Beach does.
The problem is that there really isn't any mid-tier cards for laptops, except I guess the Sound Blaster cards. And most of those are geared around 5.1 movie playback and gaming.
All the high-end ones have no MIDI synth, as they're designed for recording and playback, not gaming or all-round use.
The only options I really think you have are:
1. Use a virtual synth like Roland VSC or Yamaha's S-YXG
2. Use the BassMIDI soundfont driver, which will let you load soundfonts and use them like a wavetable device via driver without having to have a wavetable sound card (works as long as you have some sort of sound card)
3. Use the driver recently posted here that lets you load VSTi's and then via driver as MIDI synths/instruments.
- Alistair
