Laptops and shared memory for video

[david-8uUts6sDVDvs2Lz0fTdYFQ at public.gmane.org (David Kramer)]

I need to buy a new laptop for my daughter to replace her current IBM
Thinkpad T42, because it's infected with VIRTUMONDE, a very
hard-to-remove virus, and is experiencing other weird problems, like
spontaneously typing backwards, fonts appearing very tiny, etc.  I think
it's a mistake because clearly this is a software problem not a hardware
problem, but I'm being overruled ;)

OK, enough bitching.  I'm looking at moderately powerful laptops.  She
doesn't do gaming, but heavy browser/chat/email/word/photo editing.  I
would like to get at least dual core of some sort, so it will still be
useful when she gets up to more serious work.  She needs a good deal of
RAM because she tends to run it for a week or more without shutting
down.  And yes, it has to be running Windows (school work and all).
Recommendations welcome, but that's not the reason I'm writing this.

I've always felt video cards that steal main memory were "icky".  If my
laptop comes with 3GB RAM, I want to be able to use 3GB RAM.  It also
seems very inefficient to me to jump across different busses to
read/write video RAM from the video card.  But there are quite a few
laptops with "dynamic video memory" that are otherwise acceptable.

Am I being too picky?  Is this a non-issue, as long as the system has
3GB or 4GB?

Thanks.