Keith,
Thanks for the report... what kind of specs does your laptop have? I did buy a usb midi cable but haven't unpackaged it yet. I wanted to make sure I could figure out how to trigger samples via MIDI first. What I have done so far is get Reaper and load up the ReaDrums FX Template. I plugged some nice samples I found on the internet into the sampler, mapped them to the Virtual MIDI keyboard and played them that way. They sound pretty good good and you can modify them quite a bit with ReaSamplomatic. Plus all the effects bundled in Reaper you can add. I also see an fx that randomizes the sample from several so the hits aren't all identical. I'm just leery that my laptop will have too much latency. That was yesterday so your post is timely.
Chris