I'd say go for the Acer Aspire 1700 series. They use desktop components (my 2.5 year old Aspire 1703 (P4 2.66 Mhz, 80 Gb 5400 RPM disk 8 M cache, 1 GB DDR 266) outruns a younger laptop (HP/Compaq nx9010) by a factor 5 for most applications. And that old Aspire has a fairly slow shared memory graphics chip - the newer series use dedicated video memory, faster CPUs and faster disks (7200 RPM). The main advantage is that upgrading an Aspire 1700 with a larger faster disk and more memory is done at desktop prices, not at notebook prices (2-3 times as expensive). The main disadvantage is size and weight, that Aspire weighs in at a hefty 7 kilograms! When it comes to portable power for money, the Aspire 1700 series is about the best you can get. Another machine you might want to look at is IBM. A colleague of mine has an IBM notebook, ATI FireGL (professinal graphics card with perfect OpenGL support), lots of RAM, fast disk, and a very nice high resolution screen with good colors. But - it is EXPENSIVE! A Pentium M CPU at 1.7 GHz performs about the same as a regular Pentium 4 at 3.0 GHz. An Athlon64x2 4400 runs at 2.2 GHZ, and is twice as fast as a 3.5 GHz single core Pentium 4. Gigaherzes are not everything. AMD delivers much more computing power per GHz than Intel - except for the very pricey Pentium M.

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