Hmm.. Tough choice. but if you need it on the Road or for remote locations to edit photos and transfer yes Laptop is the way. But if you want a bit faster processing "speed" and flexability yo should go with a desktop machine.
Hands down desktops yo u can build one and have choice of what you wnat moreover the laptop.
Its a tough choice. I have 3 desktops and 1 laptop and I am looking at gettting another in the near future.
The matter of have Vista is another matter left to be argued. I'm sure now you will have Vista and that would get you onboard with the OS getting used to it, but most aggree that stay with XP for now if Vista dosent come with new machine.
What else are you going to do with the machine? This always matters on decisions as well..
you still have to live with the wife..

As long as you can calibrate the panel on the laptop, it will work fine for image processing. For business laptops where the user may be primarily concerned with searching the company catalogue when visiting a customer, colour accuracy is of little consequence, so you are more likely to find a panel that can be made accurate on media-oriented machines.

A large panel is a clear asset. Again for business, the smaller the machine, the easier it is to haul along. Trying to run an image processing program on a 12" screen would be excruciating in anything other than an emergency. In contrast, I have a pair of 19" monitors side by side. This gives me a large clear area with nothing but the image and the menus above, with browser and all the palettes on the second screen which gets very cluttered. If I had the desk space, my next machine would have triple monitors.

Have you considered both a desktop and a laptop? That would give you both access any time you need it. Could greatly improve or even save a marriage.

The best possible compromise would be to get a laptop that has lots of RAM and reasonable processing power, and then add a good quality LCD display that you can run from the laptop. There are now even external high-end video cards for this purpose. Then you get the best of both worlds, because for digital photography the most severe limitation is all but very pricey multimedia models just don't have either very good video cards nor ideal screen performance, but otherwise a new moderate or better quality laptop like a Toshiba or Sony Vaio is comparable in performance.

Over 2 years ago I sold my desktop and decided to move to laptop only. I got a powerful laptop with a nice screen and it's still working great. This Christmas I received a 22" widescreen flatscreen monitor which I connected to my laptop and use it now for photo/video editing. It works great. You could get the best of both worlds by doing that and make the wife happy: powerful laptop plus external monitor, all of a sudden you'd have 2 screen to do your work. With so much more screen real estate you'd feel spoiled.

Luca

Thanks to you all for all the neat ideas. One more question, how do set up a computer to run two displays? and why?

Jeff

How do you do it? Typically a video card with dual connectors. Most cards today have a digital (DVI) connector and a VGA connector. Most laptops only allow a single external monitor connection but if you wanted to run two screens, you could get a Y cable splitter to enable you to run two monitors.

Why? More real estate. You can have all your tools on one screen and the entirety of the other screen for editing. Or you can be working on a spreadsheet on one screen and something entirely different on the other.