Autocad and Photoshop have about the same characteristics in what hardware to use, so I suggest you use the Quad core laptop, with 4Gb or more RAM. 4650 or above or 9700gt or above will serve you well.
It will be nice to know what is your budget, and I will be gladly to help ya out!
One with an i7. While traditionally using Open GL Autocad has moved towards DirectX recently so I'm not sure about 2008 or whether it preforms better on Radeon or GeForce GPUs. Anyway the more powerful the GPU the better so go with a GeForce 280M (which is really a 9800GTX), or a mobile Radeon 4850.
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