What do I need to look for in a computer?

I'm going to get a new laptop & want to play SL on it. What should I look for?
RAM, video card, processor speed?
For this game, what would be the priorities?

Thanks everyone from a computer idiot!

Max out the RAM. Go for at least 1 GB, 2 GB if you can get it.

Do NOT, by any means, buy a computer (desktop OR laptop) that uses Intel Extreme Graphics for its video. That's pretty much SL suicide.

DO look for one that has NVidia video circuitry, 6600 or higher. Not easy to find in a laptop but they're out there. At least 128 MB video memory if possible.

As far as CPU speed, obviously the faster the better, but I'd look for at least 2 GHz.

I recently upgraded from 512 MB RAM to 1.5 GB on my desktop machine and was astounded at what a difference it made in SL's performance.

P2

Thanks Phoenix, that's exactally the info I was looking for!

It depends on what you intend to do with the laptop and the money you want to spend. If you have the money, one of the duel video laptops would be ideal. They come with two video cards, a low power Intel graphics chip for the mundane stuff like word processing and spreadsheets and a high power consuming Nvidia 6600 Go graphics card for high performance game use like SL.

Beware ATI graphics, their numbering system is confusing and in some cases misleading. Do not get anything labeled X200 or Radion 9250 as the performance is pretty low or may not work. The X200 is basically an Intel Extreme chip and isn't supported by SL. Fun huh. I wouldn't get an ATI video card if the laptop is primarily an SL machine as they have more problems with SL than Nvidia (but tend to be better for just about everything else). Minimum I would get would be an ATI 9500 if I had to settle for ATI, Nvidia 5500 would be the minimum for the Nvidia side.

Another big issue is shared video memory, many laptops have this and it can make SL run like crap. Many (especially ATI) will boast 128 megs of video memory but in practice 100 of that may be shared from main memory. Shared memory works just fine for spreadsheets but is way too slow for games. It also robs from available system memory so if you start with 512megs and 128 is dedicated to video memory then you only have 384megs left, take out another 200 or so for Windows and you don't have much left over for SL.

My best advice is no matter what laptop you get, make sure it will run SL before you buy it or that the retailer has a liberal return policy. Look at reviews online and see how well they can run Doom3, if it can get enough fps to play then there is a good chance it will handle SL well enough (they are both high end OpenGL based games).