From what I understand, the M class Pentium will slow down its clock speed if operated under battery power to conserve battery life. Under AC power, it runs at full clock speed.
I'm running a laptop at 1.7 gigs with 1 gig RAM and 60 GB at 7200 rpm, XP Pro. The biggest gain I've realized performance-wise was an external 200 gig, 7200 rpm USB 2,0 media drive. ALL my video and audio files are captured, edited, rendered, and processed out there. The external drive can travel with you, or remain at home to receive any files you might pick up on your OS drive in your travels.
ps: never had a crash with Vegas in 5 years on a laptop.
Who of you what have said Vegas runs on their laptop have captured HDV and edited HDV with it? I'm looking for a Vegas laptop but this is Sony's/CineForms spec for HDV capture:
512MB dual-channel PC3200 or 1066MH RDRAM
Dedicated system drive
Dedicated 7200 Vegas drive
AGP graphics with dedicated memory.
A 2 G Pentium M processor is probably roughly equivelent to a 3.2G Pentium 4. They do more work per clock cycle much the way Apple PC's do. Plus, they also conserve power as was noted. The news is that Intel is abandoning the ever-faster clock-speed war and the design of the "M" processor will be the basis of future chip designs, not the P4. The P4 was a compromised processor design from the start, aimed at making people think they were getting a better chip (or PC) because it was a "faster" than AMD's offering. Initially the strategy worked, but AMD trumped them with their 64 bit chip and slower clock speed Athalon chips that were/are just as powerful. Intel is shifting gears.
Finally, I have a Dell laptop with a 1.6 G Pentium M processor. I ran Sandra on it and it benched the same speed or slightly faster than my 2.53G home unit. You can download Sandra Lite benching software off Cnet/downloads for free and see for yourself. Some possible bottlenecks for laptops are the front side buss speed and lower hard drive rotational speeds most have (not yours apparently). What's your FSB speed? Run Sandra if you don't know.