last year I also did a test with a laptop. Worked pretty good, but it was not handy to walk around on the part with a laptop in my hands.
This year I use a PDA with wifi. Changed the webinterface to fit on PDA. (just made a subfolder in the webroot dir, with the files for PDA, so I can use both now)
Party is for this weekend. I let you know if it worked

(source will be made available here too)
ps: I also made a script to automatically display sms and mms messages I receive on my phone.