I wont bother pointing out the issues with using laptops to do anything intensive.
Dell is probably a good option man. Make sure you get 2 gigs or ram, graphics card and a decent processor. And it is probably a good idea to stay away from vista ... it is far too intensive to have running in the background while you are rendering some huge scene in vray.

I have a had bad experiences with laptops so i'm probably the wrong guy to ask.

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Yeh, Dell are pretty good, we've got one. The most intensive thing I've done on it is video editing so I can't really comment on rendering or viewing 3d scenes. We've got Vista home basic which isn't all that much different to xp except in layout and the fact that some things don't work on it. I'd recommend staying with xp unless you want to use 4 gigs of ram or DX10.

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Yeah its a difficult decision, the main concern for me is that I'm not sure if I should be paying extra for a dell m90 with a quadro card when I really just want a hi end gaming card, dell doesnt seem to let you put a games card into the M90 laptop and the gaming laptop is somewhat more expensive than even the M90 level laptop.
I'll give it some more thought.

It seems like its going to be a difficult transition to windows Vista, eventually there will be some need to start using DX10 etc.. but will all this software run on it eventually.

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Yeh, I'm thinking of upgrading soon, and vista v xp is one of the things I'm a bit unsure about. I guess vista is probably the best bet as it'll probably become more stable and user friendly as they start releasing service packs.

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