shooting with a sony cx550 and am looking to get a laptop to edit the footage. being that avchd is a bear to edit smoothly, will an i5 handle it well , if not having trouble finding an hp with an i7. will be editing on edius neo.

If you plan on keeping your laptop for any length of time ( say more than 18 months ), I would try and buy an i7 model because of the time you will save from faster edits and shorter rendering time.

how would this fare editing avchd and hd footage. editing with edius neo or edius

Heres an HP laptop im looking at:
Intel Core i7-2630QM Processor at 2GHz
6MB L3 cache
8GB DDR3 SDRAM (2 DIMM)
Drives:

750GB (5,400RPM) SATA Hard Drive
SuperMulti 8x DVD±R/RW drive with Double Layer Support
Graphics & Video:

15.6" High Definition LED BrightView display; 1366 x 768 native resolution
1GB ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 6490M GDDR5 Graphics (HDMI, VGA)
Communications:

802.11 b/g/n WLAN
Integrated 10/100/1000 Ethernet LAN
Audio:

Dolby Audio with Built-in Altec Lansing speakers
Keyboard:

Standard keyboard
Touch Pad
Personalization:

Color: Brushed aluminum in stream argento (metal)
Integrated HP TrueVision Webcam
Ports:

1x 5-in-1 Media Card Reader
4x USB 2.0 ports (one shared with eSATA port)
1x HDMI
1x VGA
1x RJ-45 (LAN)
Operating System:

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)

You might want to consider that there's support for Nvidia CUDA video chips in some of the software like Premier Pro CS5.

It doesn't look like Edius has that support, but it wouldn't hurt to have an Nvidia chip in the laptop.