This is a off topic to this forum, but I think i'ts worth it...

IMHO your mistaking the ability to "talk along" with real knowledge, DDR13/pentuim31 whatever is not relevant. like said, the PC form factor is not changed for ages.... and companies will not pay you because you're able to talk along wich Nvidea chipset is the "best" .
Unless you have a compelling reason to work mobile forget the laptop.
If you're serious to get into "IT" (and not in showing off doom8 benchmark results) I suggest to get (for the same money as a entry level portable) a cheap big tower, a rock stable motherbord and a entry level AMD/INTEL cpu (no not a via C7), a cluncky but dirt cheap *big* CRT screen and 2 gig ram (or more for a 64 biy host - but 2 gig is a start) and lots and lots of hdd space.
Install windows or linux and then download vmware server (it's free) and then start playing around.
It will allow you to play with your own full blown virtual network on your own pc, learning tcp/ip basics like routing and firewalls/packet sniffers.
make vmware images for several clients (different windows versions for example), win domain controllers, web servers on linux, samba sharing, etc,etc...
and then mess things up/play with it.

decide what you want to do/what you like
* OS support? every idiot claims to "know windows" (and imho very few MCE's actually do) it's hard to distinct yourself in that area.
* databases? learn Linux / windows basics first and then get Oracle 11g from their website (or a other RDBMS) and start reading. Knowing a RDBMS like DB2/Oracle/Sqlserver is really good for $$$. trust me on that one.
* webservices? learn Linux / BSD basics first and then hit apache
* networking? try setting up a vmware env with OS/2, dos (yeah really), windows 93/ZP/brista en a few flavors of L/Unix clients and a few win/linux servers ... all the problems will give you lot's of things to discover and learn.
* coding? check your local offer for jobs and see what they ask for the moment - java? C? #? I'm no programmer besides SQL, might ask other input on this one...
* learn what the word "backup" actually means....

buy (or download - but a paper book is much more fun to read) one or 2 reference books ( O'Reilly are good) in the area you're interested in to "bootstrap" , all the rest of the information is free on the net.

you can then even take remote control of your env trough the Nokia how 's that for "portable"?

greetz from a complete self taught IT idiot