As you might imagine, the laptop you buy depends on what you are planning on doing with it. Here's are a few comments/opinions concerning the laptop you mentioned in your opening post.

This particular HP laptop has a 17" screen, which as far as laptops go is going to be pretty heavy. If you are doing a lot of traveling or taking the laptop back and forth to the office, a model with a 14" or 15" screen might be more suitable.

This HP laptop has two 120 GB hard drives which means you'll have 240 GB total storage. You mentioned you will be storing pictures. How much room are you using now to store the pictures or how much are you planning on storing? Any music, movies, or videos to store? If it's over 70 or 80 GB worth then the two hard drives might be the cat's meow but if it is much less then it's overkill.

As for 2 GBs memory, that is about right for running Vista. Firewire is just about a dead standard so you really don't need that unless you've got a peripheral that uses it. So this might be more computer than you need for what and I think you can do better.

Cheers!
Bill