Trying to buy a Laptop

the boss wrote: well i have ran sql server on 256MB ram and it did fine with database enough to serve my purpose for next 10 years

There's a big difference between a box you run for yourself and one that runs in a production environment. Tom is referring to requirements for a server, but I don't think that's really important for the laptop. 512 MB with XP should be lots for typical stuff with MSDE. I've found that with well written code that avoids grossly oversized datasets that CPU is the most important. But that's just the nature of what I'm writing too, so take that with a grain of salt.

Thanks very much for your help.

I have put together a excel file of all the laptops that would interest me. I was wondering if anyone would give there opinion on it for me please.