I purchased a Sony Vaio PCG-F580 with the intent of using this guy on- site along with my trusty Sony DV camcorder. I had no problems using the FW connection but unfortunately the on-board 64 meg of RAM was too wimpy for Premiere.(posted 8087 days ago)I purchased and installed 128 meg strip and that worked ok but I found I could not produce more than a few minutes' worth of questionable-quality video. After doing some post-purchase research I found that the drives that come with these laptops are just not fast enough to sustain good throughput. I tried many different apps to create video and the best one to date was Premiere 5.1, but I found my best results are when doing my NLE on my DESKTOP, not laptop. Sigh. And my desktop machine is a lowly 333 MHz compared to my Vaio's 650 MHz.
The "Movie Shaker" app that came bundled with the 'top generated a good-quality video but you can't produce any serious video with it. It's fun the first three times you use it. I use it sometimes to generate some stress-free eye-candy or if I want to quickly develop a flashy video to justify the cost of the machine to my wife and friends.
Don't get me wrong about the laptop. It runs tirelessly doing other things - taxes, accounting, web design, etc. I haven't a complaint about it. But for video NLE I'd stick with the desktop machines and a SCSI drive or a real fast IDE/EIDE hard drive. Make it a 60 gig or higher - you'll need it and HD space is cheap. If you have a desktop machine, you can pick up a FW card for it at a very good price and use it with your DV cam. That's what I did with my 333 desktop and I've been pretty happy with it.