I am thinking of buying a laptop for use with vegas what is the minimum spec that I should go for. I am not a speed freak but would a P4 Celeron do or should I go for a Athlon 2.4 / 2.6
Seems like for most average sized projects a Celeron 2.x could do OK. Or the Athlon. If you've never owned a laptop I'd reccommend buying one from Dell. Next day on site service - that's what I'm talking about. If you can service laptops - build your own. If you're like me and don't have time for that, get something with a great service plan like a Dell.
If you plan on using it for audio apps too don't spend money on included sound packages cause you'll need to go better....
Perhaps one of the earlier links already covers my response, but last year I bought a super-cheap Dell Inspiron ($599 with CD burner, 256MB, 20GB drive, 1.8GHz Celeron). It runs Vegas beautifully. I use it with an external 200GB drive in a firewire enclosure.
So I have to conclude that virtually ANYTHING you can buy today has ample performance. Naturally, if you pay more you will get somewhat faster renders, but not that much faster.