I know this should really be on the music board but I figured I'd get an easier-to-understand response from here.

Basically - what do I need to get started with home recording? I want to be able to record over multiple tracks. I'm not looking for the finished product, just rough demo-quality for now. I've got a fairly old (3 years) laptop with 3GB RAM and I can get my hands on a mixer, microphones and instruments.

I'd quite like something that can create a rough drum track, though if it's going to sound utterly shit without live drums then I'd rather just leave it and get someone to record some basic drum tracks live for me.

And presumably I need something that will enable me to edit individual tracks easily and something that will enable me to feed the sound from the mixing desk to the computer.

I don't want to spend thousands or anything; just enough to enable me to do the above without too much difficulty.

Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks.