Thanks for the suggestion.  what is available is:  i7 2760 2.4 (second gen sandy bridge) 8 gb ram (will upgrade to 16 nVidia Quadro 1000m 2gb ram 1080p 15.6 inch 95 percent gamut  and option for 2 hd's in raid or without it.  and option for another mSATA hd.  all this for around 1300 sounds like a decent deal.  Just wanted to know whats a cheap yet managable edit setup. I basically want a smooth experience on the timeline, and am willing to compromise on final render times.   Is that doable on this setup? would also greatly appreciate if I could have an idea of how this coud be setup. the laptop either has to be ordered with RAID or it will not be enabled later.  Much thanks in advance.

Thanks for that reply Harm! Was also dreading raid 0 because of lots of warnings on lots of forums.

Could I setup  RAID 0 on 2 disks while installing an 80 gb or so  mSATA for boot? I am not really that excited about opening apps much quicker. I'd rather the apps work much faster *after* being opened.

OR

Could I just have one normal HD for boot and installations and use the other one for the rest of the stuff? Would that setup of be any use. Just wanted to add again that I am most likely not going to be dealing with more than Canon DSLR's footage.

Also, is there any way of buying a cheapo Quad Core sandy bridge with only intel internal graphics because then I could buy a smaller laptop and simply add CUDA processing power through

tiny.cc/eGPU

Only catch is, there are not many laptops with 4 RAM slots that are also cheap.

In fact I did check that out Bill. Was very happy to see that as well. But its news, and very good news to me that the guy did it with an eSATA port RAID, which means I can buy the laptop for cheap now and figure out HD's later. I really do not want to buy HD's at this time, prices are skyrocketing.

Overall, I really like the Lenovo W520 because of its proven rock solid stability, and, to another extent, its great keyboad. I would obviously prefer a desktop over a laptop any day, but I will be working in an environment where power blackouts are the norm. Add in  a UPS capable of supporting a powerful i7 desktop, and that costs more than a good laptop any day.

Also, I wish AMD would also step up its game, as nVidia are really getting the most out of charging us for CUDA and Optimus. My guess is nVidia will launch Optimus on desktop this next gen, when new cards are launched. Desktop GPU's use too much power even when idle.

Once again, I'd like to thank you guys, especially Harm and Bill, for being so helpful!

EDIT:

Just saw your edit Bill. Lenovo forces the buyer to buy 2 drives from it for RAID, at outrageous prices. Lenovo has the DVD drive in an Ultrabay. Which is basically a HD-caddy-ish contraption which allows for easy swapping between optical drive and disk drive (atleast thats what I saw during research). Id just rather get it with a 500 gig HD now and buy the other drive from newegg once they are cheap. I think that would be a cheaper method? Please  correct me if I am wrong.