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It's hard to make any specific recommendation about laptops, there are so many different kinds and different trade-offs. DV Rack works with virtually all current laptops. There are a few older laptops that are too slow or don't have support in their graphics chips for overlays.
You may want to stay away from a few ultra low-end, mondo-cheapo laptops because there are still some on the market that don't have much graphics support at all. These are suitable only for web browsing & email (and who would want a laptop that can't play *any* 3D games?). In general, anything with a GeForce, Radeon or Intel 830-class graphics chip is going to be great for DV Rack. (Not that DV Rack needs all that power. Having that class of chip just means that it will have all basic functions supported and reasonably up-to-date drivers available. It also indicates that the rest of the laptop is probably well-configured (ie no crippling to save a nickel)). Also, keep in mind the requirement that the graphics card have at least 32 MB of graphics memory. This is quite standard now and I'd be suspicious of anything that didn't have that much.
As for other factors, it really depends on what you value most, speed vs. weight vs. size. Earlier this year one of the programmers who works on DV Rack bought a Celeron based laptop that's rated at 1.4 Ghz and only has a 4200 rpm drive (I think it was an HP from Costco at around $800). It works fine.
We had a guest in the office a couple months ago from Europe who had this brand new really sweet Centrino-based Fujitsu machine. That thing was thinner than Paris Hilton and even sexier. We immediately asked if we could load up a beta of DV Rack on it. It worked great. I believe that it was even under 1.4 Ghz actual clock speed.
This whole Centrino thing has confused things because we can't just say "get X.X Ghz or faster and you're set". The problem is that some of these "Centrinos" are faster MHz to MHz than a Pentium 4. Other Centrinos (like the Ultra Low Voltage variety) are slower. Grrrrr.
One thing you can do is burn the free downloadable demo onto a CD-R disc and take it with you down to the computer shop. Once they know you are a serious buyer, any reputable store should let you try loading a commercial software app on the machine to test it out (as long as it can be easily uninstalled, which it can). Bring a small DV camera and a Firewire cable and you're set for a good in-store test.
--- Mark
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