You might what to post in the Computer hardware tribe...

On a new computer especially for graphics types ensure you have power the new 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo are great, good size memory recommend 2 gigs, decent size hard drive maybe around the 160+ GB range, 256 MB video card....for the Laptops I like the 17" wide screens allows for penalty of real state to work with.

Now this setup is mainly if you plan to do all you work on the laptop and not on a desktop.

zeus

As for your existing iBook... Assuming it used to work, and everything else except flash/quicktime/etc video is still working, it sounds like you have an operating system/driver problem or a software conflict or a problem with your web browser. Probably NOT a hardware problem and probably fixable without buying anything (though it will probably take some time to fix).

If you don't have access to an hour or two of f2f time with a Mac expert... (which I'm not really either)

1/ The first thing to do is try updating/reinstalling core software. Sounds like the problems you're having are in the web browser, and also a lot of underlying video software capabilities on the Mac are part of QuickTime, so see if there is a newer version of Safari and/or QuickTime you can install from Apple, or try re-installing?

2/ Next you could try an OS upgrade, if you're still on OS 9.0 or 9.1, go to apple.com and download the updates to OS 9.2.2. Sometimes the upgrade process can have a side effect of fixing problems like this, while fixing some other little bugs too.

3/ One nearly-sure way to get your video functions working would be to reinstall the operating system / restore it to factory state. this is usually not all that hard as long as you still have the operating system CDs. but you'll probably lose all your data and programs that are stored on the computer. So make sure to back everything up first (you should do this now and then anyhow) and make sure you'll have the CDs to re-install Photoshop or any other commercial software you are using.