I would absolutely recommend you get a desktop with a decent monitor rather than a laptop Darcy, or a laptop and decent external screen if you must get a laptop or you need to be able to take it to college or somewhere with you for lessons, but I doubt it. Laptops are great but they can suffer from overheating when the graphics is taxed by heavy software and the last thing you want is a shutdown in the middle of your work.
Try and stick with an Intel CPU, i5 and up and get plenty of ram, 8GB minimum. Try to get something with an SSD drive, at least for your primary drive with Windows and your apps. You don't need the absolute latest in graphics cards and they are always overpriced anyway, get something made within the last year and it will be fine for a good few years to come.
Apple laptops are fantastic, great quality stuff, but they don't have the best graphics cards and they are overpriced. You would also need to run bootcamp if you wanted to play Windows games which means installing Windows, taking up more space on your drive, and having to reboot into Windows for games and then into Mac OS for your work and stuff.
Hope this helps a bit.