Mac Pro, Laptop, or Desktop + Remote Desktop Netbook?

[Kabizzle]

Budget:1600

I'm going to college in the fall. I'm looking for a good laptop to run games such as Company of Heroes and upcoming starcraft 2 on mid-high settings, and a productivity laptop, and one that would be friendly to engineering/architecture programs such as inventor or revit, as i am an engineering major. want this machine to last a few years.

uses:
Gaming (Company of Heroes mid-high)
Productivity (Sturdy Keyboard, backlit)
Multimedia
Animation (blender rendering)
Engineering Applications (Inventor, Revit, CAD)
Audio Editing (Track Cutting, Mixing, DJing in the near future)

I live in the U.S.

My options:
13' Macbook Pro, with a windows 7 install (dual boot or virtualized in Mac OSX) - $1600 + price of W7

My current Desktop (custom circa 2007, Core2 E6600, 8800GTS320, 2gb RAM) and a netbook that i can remote desktop (how i would do that i haven't figured out, but it is a possibility)

PC Laptop. preferably a sturdy build, quality pc. My last laptop was an inspiron from 2005...didn't last one year before it got clogged and obsolete.

 

[frozenlead]

For you, I would upgrade your desktop a bit, buy a netbook, and use VNC and logmein to remote to it.

 

[alexanderm]

For you, I would upgrade your desktop a bit, buy a netbook, and use VNC and logmein to remote to it.

I want to do almost the same thing: get a machine, install VMware ESX, then W7, WinServer, and Linux. Then I want to remote to any of the OSs (but most importantly the W7) from a netbook. Any issues? Should I get XP on the netbook?

 

[frozenlead]

No issues from what I can see - but you may want a VPN client to secure your connection from anywhere. XP for netbooks is recommended, though I haven't seen any Windows 7 benchmarks on a netbook.