I was having a coffee and they claim only the biggest and baddest will do. My delivery last month of some MySQL plus my code was finalised on site with a P3-600MHz with 256MB RAM, 11GB hard disk and Windows 2000. So any current offering should do fine for what I was doing.

A game programmer would not be able to use a laptop during development. A linux command line tool writer may suffer with the laptop's hard disk speed or may just be fine.

Your question leads to more questions, as well as if you need to look to the 64-bit future. Read more about laptops and people's choices at http://reviews.cnet.com/5204-7587-0.html?forumID=69&start=0

Bob