I bought a DELL XPS laptop and am very happy with it. It's really nice because I can use it as my main system (docked) as well as take it to meetings to show clients some concepts/presentations.

Any half-decent laptop should work well enough.

I'm using an IBM laptop that I bought for £330 (about $630) including tax and delivery.

What you should be looking for is

1) Display, keyboard, touchpad/trackpoint quality.
2) Keyboard layout (esp if you switch frequently with a desktop).
3) Hard disk quality - I tend to rate Maxtor, Hitachi, IBM and Toshiba as more reliable than certain other manufacturers (but opinions may differ).

If you need more memory, you can add it later. You can even add wireless later if necessary. Unless you plan to play games, any old graphics should do, however you should probably look at Vista requirements.

Kaled.

I concur with the above. Just about any half-decent laptop made today.

In the "would be nice" category - dual-core. Very handy for developers. 1-2GB of RAM. Don't worry about pushing the speed limit - dual-core will do you more good than a few more mHz. It's nice to have a removable hard drive bay for backups. (Hint: you can generally buy a drive "carrier" for $50 or so, and put any compatible drive in it.)

Screen resolution is a consideration. 1600x1200 is handy, if you can read the tiny type. Look for 7200RPM hard drives, SATA if possible.

I have an ancient (2001) Thinkpad a31p that cost a fortune. Any current laptop is probably it's equal. (But surprisingly, not much better.) We've come to a bit of an impasse in computing power.

I've been thinking about this and wondered what people though of mac books?

How practical are they for web dev?

Be sure that it will be pre set for using two monitors.

If working with a high resolution you need also to see how your dev looks in 800 etc...

Believe me you are in for some surprises :)

If you're not totally wedded to buying Windows, consider Linux. In this case, you probably want a well-known brand (with good online support) since there are hardware compatibility issues to be researched and considered.

Kaled.

Try HP Compaq. Very cheap with the same internal hardware and fast processors the expensive guys use. Laptops are basically all the same hardware, give or take, your just paying extra for the case appearance, branding, and name.

I would not buy a laptop to use as my primary machine to use in this respect.

Been there, done that.

I bought a Dell Inspiron laptop a couple of years ago. My goal was to avoid purchasing both a desktop and a laptop computer. I wanted portability and power.

The result? A very heavy laptop that I rarely disconnect from the spaghetti soup on my desk.

It has plenty of power and plenty of ram. Not nearly enough hard disk space. It weighs nine pounds or so. It supports dual monitors, so I've got a 19" flat panel attached to it.

Also a keyboard, a mouse, an external hard drive, speakers, a printer, a scanner, ethernet, and probably a couple of other things I've forgotten. Most of the peripherals are attached to a usb hub or the usb ports on the monitor, but I still have to disconnect four or five cables every time I take it somewhere and the monitor cable must be screwed in and out.

If I had it to do again, I would get a very robust desktop 'puter and a very lightweight laptop. Nine pounds turns out to be quite a lot when you have to carry it for several hours, and I have a most awesome laptop bag with backpack straps as well as the shoulder strap.

Wow! Thank you to everybody who responded, i definately feel a little more educated than before. You've helped me to narrow down what I am REALLY looking for in a laptop and how to ask for it.

Thanks again! I appreciate it!

What type of web programming do you want to do? If you want to program on unix-type web servers you should consider getting a Mac. You get the advantages of a linux system with the ability to run a lot of programs that you can't run on Linux (ms office, etc.). And of course you get the advantages that come with a Mac but I don't want to get into that argument ;)
For instance, I have Apache, MySQL, Perl and PHP all running on my laptop and can develop and fully test web apps anywhere, evn when I have no internet connection.
But obviously if you want to program in ASP.NET you should not get a Mac ;)

But obviously if you want to program in ASP.NET you should not get a Mac ;)

I don't know about that...you can run Windows just fine on the new Macs (as a dual boot or as a virtual machine). You really get the best of both worlds...you can check how your site looks on all of the Windows browsers (or Linux if you use a virtual machine), as well as the Mac ones...as a web programmer, there really is no reason not to go with a Mac Book or Mac Book Pro.

In terms of graphics, I would be careful in using a laptop.

I have found that laptop colors are not the same as CRT screen colors. I have made graphics on the laptop only to see them as garish and over bright on the desktop.

Now that was a couple of years back but ever since then I have stuck with a good old crt screen for the graphics.

Those new extra bright glass monitors on the laptops may not suffer from this however.

Certainly, there are difference between flat panels and CRTs, but in certain target audiences, I'm sure that the majority are now using flat panels, and in another year or two, CRTs are likely to be history (at least in Europe and the US).

Kaled.

Right on solly, a Mac it is then. Though I've found windows virtual machine to be painfully slow.
Another recommendation I have is to buy the best laptop you can afford, and then some (whether it's a mac or not). I ended up upgrading to a 100GB HD and 1.25GB ram because I realized that having one machine that I can do almost everything on and take almost anywhere is worth it.
A wireless keyboard is also nice because then you are freed from having to have the laptop ... in your lap... and from having to be hunched over it. The Motion Bluetooth Keyboard with Trackball [webmasterworld.com] is a great choice because it has a trackball built right in, freeing you from having to deal with a seperate mouse.
Combine the wireless keyboard with an external 20" monitor when at home and you'll barely know that you're using a laptop.
Another thing I like is that if a thunderstorm comes around I can unplug my laptop and keep workin on it ... try that with a desktop :)

You may not need a full Windows virtual machine, depending on what applications you need to run.

A good option would be to run a version of Linux and use Wine. Alternately, Crossover Office in a packaged Wine configuration that will run Microsoft Office and many other popular apps right out of the box.

(Wine is a set of compatible libraries that will allow you to run many Windows apps on Linux. But it is NOT a virtual machine.)

If you are using an Apache server on a Linux box, there are a lot of advantages to doing your development on a Linux machine.

Both Wine and Crossover Office are available for OS X on Intel-based machines, as well as for Linux.