For a less mobile but powerful solution.
Get a 1U rack mount server, stuff it with 2 15K rpm SCSI disks using
hardware RAID 0. Get a nice LCD panel. Buy a medium sized travel
bag. Although it will blow your 2K budget.
Oh well just buy an Athlon XP coupled with a KT266A mboard (check
out tomshardware or anandtech which is the current top Athlon
boards). Stuff in 1GB of DDR, 512MB for Linux 512 for VMware
Windows. RAID IDE with 7200 rpm IDE disks. That should be pretty
fast enough.
Although Jade's suggestion is pretty tempting.
