laptop and powersupply for astrophotography, whats the min?

I'd say use the laptop you have, the only thing to look out for is the screen dewing over, the main sections heat will keep that dry, so use a box over the laptop when not using it.
Avoid Vista, XP drivers wont necessarily work with it.

thanks guys. dave, i have a windows image on the Mac also so thats not an issue, but it is vista. Im anal to the highest degree about the mac though so I still wont be bringing it out.
I have read some reviews of laptopsdirect on boards.ie and i think il steer clear. might be able to pick up something cheep and cheerful here at work. if 233mhz will run ok for photography i should be able to find something! Il be back asking about software in the near future! until then...thanks guys

However you may want to consider that (like it or not) a lot of the free software for astrophotography is windows based. For that reason you might wanna consider a cheap laptop. I guess you could pick one up on buy and sell for next to nothing nowadays.

That's not an issue on a MacBook Pro. Using something like Paralells you can just run your Windows apps right within OS X. They will even appear in the dock and everything. You won't even notice you're running windows!

Bart.

I bought a cheap laptop from Dell for €460 for that purpose.
A Vostro 1000 with AMD dual core cpu, 1Gb ram, and 60GB hard, it is capable of most astrophotography tasks.
Just look for a Dell EPP code on www.boards.ie , you'll get it about 7-8% cheaper than the Dell website

Regards
Darragh

I hear that there are now car power adapters for your laptop too.

Yea, I have vista running via bootcamp, and also via parallels on mac, and in some tasks vista is faster when running through parallels virtual machine, but thats neither here nor there. Il have a look on boards.

no car seanie