My Toshiba laptop that I've had for about 4 years gave out on me recently so I'm in the market for something new and could use some advice.

I don't know which brands currently offer the best prices and features. I'm probably not going back to Toshiba unless I found a spectacular deal.

My budget is $1K tops. I am hoping to find an i5 with separate graphics card. I don't really care whether it's 64 bit or not, although most seem to come with Win 7 64 bit now. Are Dual Core processors even still worth getting? Should I get a Dual Core and load up on RAM or an i5 with the most RAM I can get for my price range? I'm leaning for the latter since RAM isn't that pricey and I can always slap a bit more in there later on. Also, do any in that price range come with Blu Ray burners installed? That would be a nice option to have for the future but I won't be heart broken if I can't get one.

As far as my general work I still do mostly SD video with an occasional HDV project shot with Canon HV40's so at least for the forseeable future a 1440X1080 HDV project would be the most intensive project I'd have.

Lots of great discussion on this very topic over in the PC Editing subforum, where I suspect this thread will get moved shortly.

FWIW I've had a nightmare of a time with a new HP desktop which crapped out on me (random rebooting, blue screen of deaths, failed startups) in less than 6 months, and their "award winning warranty support" is atrocious. It's currently on it's 3rd attempt & I haven't had it working since mid-December. It's been so bad I went out to the Sony Outlet store to buy me a fairly decent laptop.