I have just recently been confronted with that exact same dilemma and I can personally say that #1 choice all the way. I had a HP Tablet as mentioned by someone in this thread earlier and it was a great laptop, but it just wasn't strong enough. I could do my works well enough but I would...
I currently have win7 Beta disc but no computer to download the win7 RC yet so I wonder if I could just install the win7 Beta on my soon to be built PC and then upgrade to the RC version that way? or do I still have to download the RC and burn to another DVD-R then reinstall win7 yet again...
Look up GIMP. it is an Open-Source photo-editing program that is incredibly powerful for it's price (free!). It does have a bit of a learning curve but it shouldn't be too hard if you are used to layers and general photo editing from other programs.