On the road help
 

I will be doing daily 1-2 minute video blogs from a road rally (http://think.mtv.com/ChallengeX08/) and everything I need camera, laptop, ect. I have to be able to carry.
I bought a new laptop (2.6 processor, 4 G ram) and all advice I can find recommends using alt drives in Vegas to store clips and for scratch space.
I have a 80G USB external but would I be better off with a couple of flash drives (which I notice come in up to 32G variety)? I don't expect any clips to be bigger than 4G.

flahs drives
 

Some flash drives had horribly slow transfer speeds which may impact your ability to use them to store footage for editing. They are cheap, but (in my opinion) nothing near the price / storage ratio of a external USB drive.

I think other concerns like power & dust might be more likely to impact your editing than the hardware specs. If this is a business critical shoot, then get spares for almost everything and charge accordingly. If this is a hobby, then come as prepared as your budget will allow. Unless the location is near a metropolitan area and you can count on having a Best Buy type store near by to buy a space HD if yours fails, etc.