Reply to What I really need for music production (beginner questions)

Hey everyone,
PHader here, I have been djing now for a while but I really want to make my own tracks. I have done some crappy beats/ remixes/mashups but I really want to start ground floor on building good electro tracks. I'm into the real heavy dirty synths and what have you and I have some great Ideas for producing but I have ran into some problems. Overall the gear I have is great for when I was playing out with my friends at clubs but I want something more portable to go along with me. At the moment I have Reason 4 and Ableton live 8 installed on a higher end mini mac along with my dj software and gigs of music. As far as midi interfaces I have an mpk25, an lpd8 (i have had the mpk25 for a while now or I would have gotten the mpk mini), an apc40 and a traktor kontrol f1. What initially I want to do is create my different sounds (beats, bass, synths) and lay them out in my sequencer to make a release-able track. I also want to turn my sounds into clips and then actually play my tracks; Ideally in some cases there would be 3 releases of my track, the original that I fully laid out, the studio session of me playing (probably on the apc40 so I can do the mastering in ableton) and a true out live set where I have taken my sounds exported them as mp3's and put them into my traktor remix sets and play it out with the F1. What I guess what I really want to know is:
- What is a good cheap laptop that I can produce on?
- Should I buy an external sound card? If so what is a good one?
- where are some good sites that you get vst's for free/cheap?
- Where do you go to get you samples (drum kits, synth sounds, etc)? are they cheap or free?
- Should I get away from the software I'm using and take a look at something else?
- Am I able to produce good tracks with the speakers/headphones I have or should I upgrade? (I'm using some numark red wave dj headphones, and I have some M-audio bx5a studio monitors)

Overall some guidance would really be appreciated because I love doing this stuff, and I want the world to hear some of the ideas I have in music but I just feel like I know what I want as the outcome, but I don't have to tools to get there and the tools I do are scattered everywhere.

Thanks for your time,
PHader