what laptop should i buy?

Apple MBP has all you need including the video editor and similarly priced to what you're trying to configure on wintel without being such a RAM hog except if you want to run vista via Boot camp or Parallels...may be worth looking into if you're serious about editing video...better yet the new iMac or Mac Pro

Not to sound like another fanboy, but sndfreg is dead on. If you are serious about video editing go with the Mac and Final Cut Studio. With the exception of AVID systems (way above the average person's budget) Final Cut is the standard.

If it is just a hobby, and you really want a Windows box, just buy the most you can afford with the most ram. I may be wrong, but I still don't think that Windows protects the memory very well. That said, I wouldn't trust any serious work to Vista yet.

my suggestion inspiron 1521 - you can customize it to get 4gbs of ram with a 1.7ghz dual core processor - for $1199 http://tinyurl.com/2r7rj8

in general, for video editing i'd recommend a decent amount of ram and atleast 14 inch screen

I agree, for video editing and multitasking ram is the most important thing. Next to look at would be the graphics card. If you decide to go windows, it will be a lot easier to find a Vista box, and with that you should make sure your graphics card is DirectX10 compatible. Next cosideration would either be harddrive or processor. Be careful trying to do video editing from an external source - there will probably be pretty rough bottle necks in data transfer.

All of that said - everything said above about Macs and video editing is correct.

I have to disagree; absolutely use an external drive. Go with eSata or Firewire 800 in (if possible) raid configuration. You don't want to edit video on the same drive as your OS. Plus, laptop hard drives are typically 5400rpm, while some are available with 7200rpm.

Depending on the project, you can go through several hundred gigs of space will you edit.

a raid setup is awesome, if you can afford it, do you edit for a living or just a hobby, is is short form or long form, standard def or hd? Alien makes some great laptops, kinda pricey but a solid product

also I heard vista won't give you the time of day at 1 gig, so I dont see 2 gigs being that much of an improvement, I went mac 13 years ago and never looked back. They just dropped the prices as well. 24" iMac for 1799.00!

Well, Macs are nice -- I have one -- but there are plenty of people who edit video on Windows, too. I don't know if you necessarily want to upgrade to Vista, though -- XP will be faster and run everything you need to run for the next few years. That way you will definitely see the jump in performance you're looking for.

Video editing is never going to be great on a laptop. I would recommend buying an external monitor to do your editing on... but of course that's more money. You could keep your current laptop, add some ram, and buy a desktop for video editing, and you still might spend less money than if you bought a really fast laptop.

I would have to recommend a mac simply because of final cut studio. at lest head down to an apple store near you and give one a test run.

I’m another Mas user. But seriously for laptop editing- i’m not sure you’re going to find better. Agree with Glial- edit on an external, definitely. Yes, and i agree again- the speed of the hard drive really does matter. This was dealt with in another question but using a laptop with a CRT to monitor your image is a fine way to work, cheap because they are easy to find- anyway it’s worked for me. I haven’t edited on PC in awhile but Abode Premiere used to be what most people I knew used. Good luck.

The laptops from System 76 are supposed to be very good. They don’t come with Windows though.