I wouldn't wast money on a Celeron. You can get GOOD laptops under $1000 that are both P3/4 AND AMD-XP. Get any of those instead.

I've recently picked up a (shudder) Dell Pentium-M laptop. (last week)..
It is a 1.7 Ghz but being that it is a pentium M it is a lot faster than you might think...
I'll try to run the rendertest veg (if I can remember where I saw it) an post the results.

The nice thing about the pentium-m laptops (v.s. P4 or P4-M) is that
they tend to have better battery life.

Ahh... Intel must be doing the same thing AMD has been for a while: telling the rating not the actuatul speed. Strange how Intel says AMD is wrong for not saying the actual mhz, but intel does it now! :)

Is a Celeron OK "enough" for video editing? Yes. The main annoyance in using slower, less powerful processors is the lag in rendering times. Aside from that and having less real "real time" previewing if you can live with thoseminor limitations, you can save a few bucks.

Yes and no...They ARe doing the same thing as AMD in that they have created a new processor with a shorter pipleline than the standard Pentium 4.

They ARE NOT doing the ratings game thing where they call something
a 1.7 Ghz when it is something else or give it a name like 1700..

They just flat out call this a Pentium-M 1.7 Ghz. It just happens to execute most code at about the speed of a Pentium 4 2.4-2.8 Ghz at a fraction of the power.

I think he could get an AMD laptop for about the same price as an AMD-XP one. Do Celeron's stil have the 66mhz bus limit, or did they up it to 100?

Celerons are MUCH faster than a few years ago. I bought a cheap Dell Inspiron laptop last winter with a Celeron 1.6. It's faster than my Athlon 1.3GHz desktop at rendering. I think on the RenderTest veg file it finished in about 3 minutes.

I guess it's a natural desire to have the fastest car or PC on the block, but honestly, Vegas does very well on ANY contemporary PC. If you find you are constantly rendering very large avis and just can't stand the thought of opening a second instance of Vegas (so that you can continue to edit while the first instance is rendering away happily in the background), then by all means buy leading edge.

As for me, I'd take the couple hundred and invest it in an external 200GB/firewire drive for your laptop editing.

Celerons & Durons have always been slightly crippled versions of more powerful chips. But a 2.4GHz anything is pretty fast. Plus, some tasks are almost purely clockspeed related, and rendering is one of them.

Check out some of the geek sites (anantech, Tom's hardware guide) to see how much of a hit modern celerons take in speed, and make your call.