m30x or p30

I am planning on purchasing a notebook, and after reading through many reviews and discussions, I am leaning heavily toward Toshiba. I have narrowed it down to either the m30x or the p30--both customizable through Toshiba's website--which is nice, because most of the specs can be made very comparably on either system...as different as they seem. I would be using the laptop mainly for multimedia work--including picture editing/graphic design, web design, recording of/editing music through home studio software, and possibly some video editing. I will be doing some traveling with it as well...but the weight and size are not a big issue to me--both will fit in a bag that I can carry.

I would welcome any comments regarding the following:

1. How does the Pentium M in the m30x compare with the Pentium 4 in the p30? Does one or both run extremely hot? If so, is it a critical issue--i.e. damage to the machine, or is it just a matter of not wanting to put it on one's lap? Also, on the Pentium M, is there a big difference performance-wise in the range of 1.6 gHz to 2.0 gHz?

2. Concerning the screen size and clarity. This is an important issue for me considering that I do a lot of picture editing. How do the screens compare on these two systems? The 17 inch sounds nice, considering that I have a 19 inch display on my desktop...which I am selling. But is it a quality screen? Can anyone speak from experience how much of a difference they notice in ease of use between the 17 inch and the 15.4 inch display for picture editing?How much of a difference is there between the 64 MB Radeon and the 128 MB Radeon? I am not a gamer, but I might watch a few movies on it, and possibly do some video editing in the future.

I would appreciate any advice on these things, and any other comments that may be helpful. Thanks!

 

1. The Pentium M CPU's are rated almost as fast as a P4 with a clock speed 2X faster. Here's a couple of links to checkout.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2129&p=1
http://www.notebookreview.com/forums/post.asp?method=Reply&TOPIC_ID=10122&FORUM_ID=9

2. The Pentium M's run WAY cooler than the P4 CPU's. Since the P4 in the P30 is a Desktop CPU they're gonna run hot. If you don't have proper cooling/ventilation for the P4, it can/will overheat. In this case, yes, you can cause damage to the system if it overheats.

3. Yes, you will notice a speed difference between a PM 1.6 & PM 2.0.

4. Since both screens are/can be TruBrite, they'll generally look the same. But since you're editing photos, you're gonna want an LCD that offers high resolutions and large screens. There's no difference between a 64MB & 128MB graphics card when doing photo editing. You'll mainly see the difference with games. DVD watching and video editing are all CPU/memory intensive, so the graphics card won't be a bottleneck.

-Vb-