Best laptop/notebook for Multimedia Development

I'm shopping for an ideal laptop on which to run Macromedia Director, Flash, Dreamweaver, etc. plus Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator I also do a lot of digital video editing. I'm looking at the Gateway 600X and the Dell Inspiron 8500 as the basic hardware (maxed out in the areas of speed, RAM, and HD storage space), but neither of these two notebooks have received more than mediocre reviews. Is there a better brand or model that I should be checking out?

Well... I am in Europe, but just recently I have bought Sony VAIO -also spent some time on comparing it to a couple of Toshiba machines...

The real thing which convinced me to buy VAIO was 16" monitor, because RAM/CPU/HDD speed were very much comparable...

At the risk of unintentionally starting a Mac vs. Windows war... Have you considered a Titanium Powerbook? It's pretty great to have PHP and MySQL and Apache and Perl and whatever else you want running on a FreeBSD UNIX server that's an inch think and sitting on your lap. I know you can do all that with Linux too, but (unfortunately) you can't run Director, Flash, Photoshop, etc. in Linux natively (not yet anyway). I was a bit skeptical at first, but now I don't know how I ever survived without OS X on a laptop. It's really quite a pleasure to use as a development platform.

Actually I did consider a Mac, but I'd have to reinvest a few grand in new Mac-based software that I already have. Plus, I'd have to be able to integrate the laptop with V-Tel broadcast technology and that is windows-based (as far as I know).

Hi ya,..
check out the 'DELL Precision M50' instead of 'Dell Inspiron 8500'

you'll find more here

URL

hope this helps
cheers

I've been looking for a good laptop to work those programs (Flash,Photoshop etc.) on and would defenitely buy a powerbook if I had the money, but I don't so I'm considering buying a 800 Mhz Ibook instead.

Is this machine powerfull enough though? Should I wait and hold out to buy the powerbook?

Cheers,

Lawrie

Here's my 2 cents:

In the bang for your buck department, you'll definitely get a faster machine if you go wintel instead of iBook. So maybe Photoshop will open a few seconds faster.

But if it were me, I'd still go for the iBook because overall, I think I'd be more productive. I find that with my Macs, I spend significantly less time mucking about with my machine (viruses, crashes, etc) and much more time getting work done.

If there's anyway you can scrape together the extra cash for a shiny new Powerbook, though... I'm sure you'd be much happier on a G4.

Good luck...