My experiances of laptops has been just as painful, when I started my business some 2 years ago, I purchased a laptop thinking it was the best choice - I needed something to do my main design work on and something to go mobile to show clients work-in-progress and final results. I too then spent days searching for the best product for my money and ended up spending £1,200 on a AMD 1.4GHz with a good array of ports etc.
Unfortuatly for me, the graphical capabilities of the unit could not handle high end graphic production from applications like Photoshop, the unit kept crashing because the shared memory of the AGP graphics and tiny cooling fan could not handle the work load. Also the LCD screen cannot display the true colours needed for graphic design and I often got a false impression of what the work looked like. So after several months, I bought a meaty desktop and 19" monitor. So now the laptop is only used for testing websites and showing work to clients at their locations.
So when choosing a laptop, you need to know excatly what you're gonna do with it. If you just want something for basic office work (word processing, spreadsheets etc) and surfing the net, then great - there's loads of choice. If you want something to perform the full range of multimedia tasks and good graphic handeling - stay with desktops..
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