Need help with processors, graphics cards, etc. what to buy?

Alright, i have basiclly been looking around everywhere for laptops and now i have some questions on what i should get. I will be using my laptop for recording (HD) using cubase sx, and photoshop and maya work. I will also want to play games on my comp, although gaming is not as important as the graphics designing. So basicly, for around 2,000-2,200 dollars im looking for a laptop with a 60 gig 7200 rpm drive, a decent proccessor (the most demanding thing i'll be doing is rendering particle explosions in maya), a decent graphics card, 1 or 2 gigs of ram, and a firewire port (or pci card slot for a cardbus). Therefore a 7.1 hd output sound card is ideal... I don't care at all about weight (as i will just need a beast to carry around that hopefully i can deal with in terms of weight) and i don't care about battery. I just want to get the best overall performance for the best price.

I have looked at hp, acer, dell, alienware, voodoo, sager, rockdirect, toshiba, ibm, xotic pc etc. In terms of processing speed im plain confused. I know that a pentium 4 650 (3.4 ghz) has a 2mb cauche (L2), but how does it differ to a pentium m 2 ghz 760 performance wise. I know the m tries to save battery, but what is the equivilant pentium m to a pentium 4 6xx series? It seems that the p4 650 could devistate the m 760 because they both have the same cache, but i duno.

About the graphics card: Okay so i looked at the rockdirect xtreme ti 3.4 (p4 650) and as i can buy from uk or us i like the pricing (maybe a bit high compared to like hp but still okay) and the specs. The thing im confused about is the graphics card. It has a ati x800xt pe (which ive read doesn't have pixel shader v.3 support). Does the pixel shader support matter for open gl rendering with maya. I don't even know if this card supports open gl. Also it seems for some reason that the anti-aliasing is bad? I don't want to get an amazing gaming card and have bad results in ps (like with feathering and such) and etc. Does this even matter? I looked at the dell m70 precision workstation with a nvidia quadro go fx 1400 (supposed to be good and supports the pixel shader 3.) and i was wondering how this card would do. How would the 1400 do for gaming on like doom3 or bf2. I also was looking at the ATI Mobility FireGL V5000 in some hp buisness laptops.

In terms of overall company quality im confused... i have a powerbook g4 867 mhz right now that has been working for 3 years and i still love it. Now im hoping to get a nicer laptop because of my needs for performance for creative applications. Alienware is too expenive, dell is crap, hp doesn't really give u a 2gb ram card? i need help here.