I have the Compaq R3000z with a 3400+ processor and 1G of memory. The
video card is nothing to write home about but it's adequate for my
purposes, but I use Linux and don't care about DirectX. The disk is
also slow, 4400 RPM. The processor is extremely fast, in my benchmarking
it's up to twice as fast as my 2.66GHz Xeon. However I'm using it for FPGA
design work so the types of things that are important to me are Verilog
simulators and place and route tools. Those types of applications don't
use the SSE3 instructions, video editing does. The P4 architecture is
generally awful for general purpose computing but it does very well on
video type applications because the SSE3 instructions are helped by the
high clock rate. The Pentium M processor is much more efficient than P4
for general purpose computing but it's lower clock rate means that the
SSE3 instructions aren't going to be as fast. The issue of 32 bit vs 64
bit is irrelevant in a laptop. There are only two DIMM sockets so there is
no way that this box is ever going to have more than 4G of RAM in it. If I
were looking for a video editing machine I'd get a 3.2GHz P4 with a fast
graphics processor, 1G of RAM and at least a 5400RPM disk. P4 laptops are
generally a lot cheaper than Pentium M laptops so you can get more RAM and
a faster disk for the same money.