OT: Mac Pro vs. Macbook Pro with InDesign CS4?

I currently have MacBook Pro 2.4 Core 2 Duo (late 2007) with 4 gb ram.
I have pretty heavy jobs once in a while, juggling three 100+ page brochures at the same time with heavy Photoshop work and Illustrator stuff. InDesign files have thousands (I'm not exaggarating) of image links.
Now I'm facing one of these assignments again and I'm thinking if I should upgrade to Mac Pro, because Macbook Pro gets very hot and laggy switching between three huge InDesign work files.
I see alot of benchmarks for After Effects, Photoshop etc and see the benefit is pretty nice, but no benchmarks for InDesign. Obviously, as it's not a render, but workflow smoothness issue.
Does anyone have experience on big InDesign work files on Mac Pro vs. Macbook Pro? I suppose it's more up to RAM and video card performance than actual CPU? What makes a killer InDesign machine?
Project takes up to 2 months and if I save 30 minutes a day due to faster work flow, I save many days of work and a lot of nerves.

Well in general a laptop isn't going to compete head to head with a tower. As you mention, a tower can run larger and much more power-hungry parts. So I would bet a 3ghz machine would definitely beat your laptop in a speed race. OTOH, whether you will see 30 minutes a day is harder to determine.
Maybe you could post some sort of sample file w/ graphics and some kind soul could do a few tests? I did this with some random file a long time ago to determine how much of a hit we were taking running in emulated mode on an Intel and I think the tests I used were:
Time to open, time to export INX, time to import INX, time to scroll top to bottom of doc with overprint preview on, time to print all (could probably do export all to hi-rez PDF too).
One other thing:
people keep thinking the new Nehalem towers are going to drop "soon". So you might want to wait just a little bit longer to see if you can maybe get a little bit more bang for your buck.

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