Thanks for the feedback guys.

My desktop will remain my primary photo editing machine, I would only use this laptop secondarily. I also wouldn't be making any prints off the laptop either, so being exceptionally accurate isn't necessary. I was only wanting something that was color accurate enough to make it so that editing images was not a waste of time, which I think unfortunately it probably will be, your responses seem to indicate that too. Sounds like I should just stick with the tablet idea.

Terry - the 15-16" laptops have much lower battery life and are bulkier and more cumbersome to take around a classroom environment. I know the 14 and under have a premium, but I just need that premium. Fortunately, I have a microcenter right down the street, so I have a huge, good selection of well-priced laptops. I won't be getting ripped off at best buy :P.

I'm actually running 32-bit with 2.5 gigs of memory now. Most people would gasp at my super-low amount of ram, but I'm a computer geek and I manage the 2.5 gigs well, right now I'm only using 825MB of it . I've found that most of the time its excessive and wasteful using more than that. Of course, I'll need more when I decide to upgrade to a 24 Megapixel full frame camera. Right now it handles the raws and multi-layers of a 12MP just fine.