A dedicated grapghics card will alwasy give you better results on either a laptop or a desktop Jess - I have dedicated cards on both of mine and it makes quite a difference. You dont have to have it but it will improve performance.
MY laptop is a Dell - I mainly use it for work but I also have PSCS2 on it so I can scrap on the fly if I want to.
Its a widescreen with 1GBRAM, Dedicated 128MB graphics card ( my desktop has a 256MB graphcs card) and a DVD/CD burner so I only have a 40GB hard drive since i dont need to keep a lot of things on it anyway.
The article here
http://scrapbook-bytes.com/cgi-scrip...icle_365.shtml applies to laptops as much as desktops