dual purpose (hopefully) laptop for machine contro

I just passed my Maintenance Machinist test at school and am now into the CNC part. I want to get a laptop so I can run prg's like gwizard, cncsimulator pro, etc at home to double check my g-code, but would also like to keep an eye on being able to power my home cnc router on the same machine away from home...like at flea markets, etc. Version one of my cnc router used a desktop machine without chopper frequency control on the steppers and it did fine but was only pushing a Dremel for the spindle. I've since bought a 2.2kw water cooled spindle w/VFD drive.
I want to dual boot to win7/linuxcnc with the emphasis on the cnc control side...I can live with long waits for cnc calculations in software as long as my controller side is stable and not hesitant.
any opinions of what...if any laptops...would be appropriate?

For your machine look for a small motherboard like the J15000 or was it J18000 I can't remember now.

The J1800 and J1900 based boards are the ones recommended by PCW, now that the kernel issue regards USB with these is fixed in the debian iso.

While laptops are not usually recommend, some have had success.
Also depending on what you are doing a realtime error from time to time may not be the end of the world - particularly if using hardware stepping.

I'm not recommending - I'm telling you, that if I had a laptop lying around I would just try it.

look here for some systems tried (there are some laptops there)
wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Latency-Test