laptops are nowhere near as hardy as desktops, and if you ask youll find people that swear they wont buy laptops from just about any brand. i, for example, will never buy anything from HP/Compaq again.

the only advice i can give you is this:

dont look for something 'future proof' or bleeding edge, this is always a waste of money with computers - especially with something as short-lived as a laptop. shop around for a great deal on something that will meet or exceed your needs now, and make sure (if you can) to pick it up on a CC that offers extended warranty perks. on mine, if i purchase something they automatically give me a year free accidental/theft coverage on it and double the factory warranty (as long as i do not purchase any extended warranties). that gives me at least two years of no worries.

Quote - I am kind of stuck with a laptop because I need to travel with it, but I could have a laptop and a desktop I suppose. What have you found to be a great configuration with regard to RAM memory and video cards for improving rendering speed. Is there a need for more than 8GB RAM? I have seen systems with 2 video cards, is there an advantage to this in Poser or just with gaming?

sorry i forgot to answer these:

i dont see how SLI (2 video cards) would give any benefit in Poser, and unless you are looking for a gaming laptop you are just wasting money for added weight/heat and reduced battery life.  graphics cards have no effect on actual rendering, simply on your Poser OpenGL workspace preview. i can not tell the difference between a Poser workspace running on a 1024mb Geforce GTX 460, an 896mb GTX 260,  or an old 256mb Geforce 7600 GT.  the OpenGL workspace preview is a trivial task for modern graphics cards.  so is HD video decoding, if you watch a lot of movies. unless you are a gamer, until GPGPU becomes mainstream you are unlikely to get any benefit outside the workspace.

unless you are doing content creation, more than 8 gigs of RAM would also give you little or no benefit. currently with 8 gigs i can have poser, photoshop, zbrush, silo etc open at once and work away on them, tabbing back and forth between programs. i currently only run into memory issues when working with extremely high resolution textures/3d view freezes in Bodypaint/C4D or when generating displacement maps in Zbrush from heavily subdivided meshes - but most of these i can workaround by just closing apps and compacting memory.  i really dont see how Poser would ever need more than 8 gigs: granted i do mostly pinup style renders, but i render with maxxed out settings with raytracing/reflections/GI and have not once seen poser use more than a couple gigs of memory tops.

a Core i7 (or even i5) laptop with 8 gigs of RAM, a halfdecent graphics chipset and windows 7 64 would meet or exceed your needs.

incidentally, the most noticeable performance upgrade for Poser - at least for me - was replacing the factory HDD for a faster one (7600 RPM - im not quite ready to switch to SSD yet due to the rash of reliability issues). this also has a secondary benefit in that you can just yank the stock HDD out (with all the factory installed bloatware/trialware) and set it aside. do a clean install of your OS and programs on the new drive, and if for any reason you need to send the laptop back for warranty you can just pop the stock HDD back in and keep your work drive.