If the recording host has to be located in the room where the recording takes place, try to get an acoustically insulated chassis and silent, low spinning hard drives.
If you want to use a laptop, record via a USB audio device (e.g. Griffin Technology's iMic). An alternative without laptop is to use a standalone digital recording device (e.g. Nomad Jukebox). Such a device can record up to 4 hours of uncompressed audio data onto its internal hard disk and then allows a rapid transfer of data to the computer via USB or FireWire.