Sorry, I have a tendency to scan through walls of text - a bad habit I need to break.

I would not get the best money could buy. From a monentary stand point you are throwing your money away. The depreciation is worse than new cars.

$3,000 for a laptop is just way too much. $1,800 would be the max I would spend on one. While 7 years from now (like the laptop I'm using) it won't have the battery life nor the power but you will still have a nice laptop to browse the web, check e-mail, and what not. This computer runs Maple 13 like a charm and I only have 1.5gigs of RAM on it. Of course I haven't tried anything horribly computation heavy.

One way I build computers/look for specs is get a new high graphics game and look at the required specs. Really processing power isn't much of an issue even at the dual core mark  but RAM is. You may be a little hard pressed to fit 8 gigs in a laptop but I know they make em. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220704 Out of stock....but that's basically what you are looking for.

Aye - the big thing you will run into trouble with is the RAM. Honestly if you can upgrade your RAM to 8gigs, that's your best (and cheapest) bet with what you are already running compared to what you are looking at.

If money isn't an issue - why not eh?