Tanks, tanks and more tanks!

[offive]

I do think the pally is the easiest to tank with, I have all the tanks but a feral drood (mine is 72 and leveling with a pack of hunters). The classic pally shammy combo does offer a lot of advantages, hence the popularity. Pally tank rotation is really simple, shammy /click sequences are simple as well. You can get massive healing and quite good dps out of the shammys. There are many ways to skin the cat so to speak, it all comes down to your level of interest and creativity.

If you set up your mixed melee and ranged correctly its not too much harder to play than a tank/ranged team. The big additon is hitting interact with target so your melees run and face the right way. I have run mixed melee and casters with my different tanks and really I find it a nice break from the classic tank and ranged team makeup.

When I was leveling my group of DKs I found and stuck with a blood worm and permanent ghoul spec that allowed for decent self healing and dps in blood presence. Tanking spec is pretty much dual wield full frost for howling blast. I boiled my dps DKs down to a single cast sequence rotation based on rune timing and I am happy with the dps level they kick out.

If you want the pally tank fast, a RAF setup is the fastest way to go. If your looking for fast ways to gear toons out then full 5 boxing makes the badges roll in once you get a base level of decent 80 gear. I also think once you start 5 boxing you will get hooked, as most do. Two boxing... tank and healer would be your ideal for pugging, but tank and ranged dps would be the easiest to control. Raiding anything as a multi boxer is easier if you pick all one class and spec. I know you said your not into, but I thought I would throw it out there.

Just like you, I want options when Cataclysm comes out, so that I can play whatever classes get tweaked into popularity or gets me interested. The whole hunter focus thing has me interested so I will have 5 hunters ready to level up to 85.

I only play games on laptops when I am on the road, otherwise I prefer the big honking monitor (or two) and full speaker setup. So I would say sure your laptop might play 5 wows, but why would you want to? If your going to box, it means your gonna spend the money, so spend the money and do it right. You can find lots of computer spec's in the hardware section. The base key things for software boxing are quad core proc, at least 8 gigs of ram, a fast video card if not two, and decent hard drive speed (but it looks like you know about SSDs). Hexa core procs are on the way this year, but no real date set to my knowledge.

I hope my wall of text helps you out!