Setup idea for running wow on laptop

[Verita vita]

I'm going to buy a laptop before the exp comes out. I've been gaming on the same desktop I've built a couple years back and I've been constantly upgrading it. I'm going to college now and I need something mobile but I still want the ability to go big when I'm at my apartment. So my idea is to probably buy a macbook pro 13' and play wow on it when I'm not home then when I am home use the hdmi output onto my TV.

If I ran wow off an external harddrive would the laptop heat up less?
Also, would I lose performance by running it off of a ext hdd, I mean flash is faster and more energy efficient the spinning hdd and it's going through usb. I saw someone mention ext hdd when I did the search function for macbook pro 13'.

I'd also appreciate any feedback on the performance of the new macbook pro 13'

[vesseblah]

If I ran wow off an external harddrive would the laptop heat up less?
Also, would I lose performance by running it off of a ext hdd, I mean flash is faster and more energy efficient the spinning hdd and it's going through usb. I saw someone mention ext hdd when I did the search function for macbook pro 13'.

I'd also appreciate any feedback on the performance of the new macbook pro 13'

Performance should be totally enough for WoW today, but nobody knows yet what Cataclysm requires.

Running the game from external HDD makes no sense unless your internal HDD is full. There's no significant difference in heat and it eats up from the already limited USB ports from the fucked-up Mac laptop design. Those come with 2 USB ports, if you have external mouse and keyboard, you already need a hub for the HDD.

[Dethh]

Wouldn't an external technically be slower?

[vesseblah]

Most likely yes, but it doesn't make much difference on anything besides zoning into Dalaran or things like that.