[h0ughy (David)]

something with lots of Ram, at least a 15.4" screen (preferably a clear superscreen version) a dual layer dvd (although single layer is cheaper) as mush hdd space as possible (you can offset this by having a 3.5" portable HDD of any size to download information to ) USB2, firewire, its up to you if you require the wireless connectivity, if your on a battery is sucks the life out of the laptop battery. but in saying all that, if you can't afford a "new" laptop and I would say the $1000 lappy would be a good beast with at least 512MB to a gig memory, they only ship with 256k, 64 of which goes to the video driver. 512MB memory is cheap, so throw a stick in, your lappy will love it and run heaps "quicker". also only have running essential programs, if you are not networked, on the net or reading data from other peoples HDD's or DVD's then turn it off, also any spyware programs and any other nice window dressing software you have loaded. I have 3 laptops, a compaq e600 - P111 866Mhz 256mb, 15gig cdrw/dvd, 14" tft, a toshiba 2.4 gig p4, 15" tft, 512mb, 60 gig HDD with USB2 and firewire cdrw/dvd, andthe one I am on at the moment, a P4 3.04Gig, 768MB ram, 40 gig HDD, clearscreen 15.4" dvdrw. they all work well. I rebuilt the compaq one from parts to make it up and only cost me $100 - I may use that for driving the scope, leaving the others for more labor intensive work.