Thanks. Unfortunately they are beyond my budget.
Decided to go with HP Pavillion DV8000T - for less than $1200 USD you can get a 17-inch screen laptop and 256MB nVidia 7600 card.

I might have to go with a HP Pavillion instead.
They have a choice of Turion 64 X2 and Core Duo.
Which one is better?

Not a lot of choice in Canada - only Dell seems to sell configurable laptops.
HP, Toshiba, etc sell via BesBuy, FutureShop, etc. For the money they ask for a laptop with integrated Intel video (pfu), you can get a Dell Inspiron 6400 with 256 MB nVidia card.

However, today Dell annouced that they're recalling 4.1 Million laptops because of possibility of battery fire/explosion:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/14/technology/14cnd-battery.html?hp&ex=1155614400&en=499692c95b993103&ei=5094&partner=homepage [nytimes.com]

Not sure what to do now. Hope that the newly assembled laptops won't have such a serious problem

Thanks a lot.

Hi, all
Planning to get a laptop and want to run Houdini Apprentice on it. Should I choose an ATI card (e.g. 256MB ATI Mobility Radeon X1400) or a Nvidia card (256MB GeForce™Go 7300)? I would like to try Apprentice under both Windows and Linux(Ubuntu or Suse most probably).

Thanks in advance.