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Being a DM is often a difficult job. One of the difficulties, but not the only one, is tracking a large amount of information. I think one of the best tools to handle this is a laptop. I think most people have access to a laptop and anyone who invests most likely hundreds of dollars into D&D books can probably drop a couple hundred on a low performance laptop.

So what should you have open on laptop. Well Wizards would probably want you to have some D&D insider tool open, but I don't see the big value in that for a tabletop game. A vritual tabletop really only helps if you have some kind of projector or if everyone has a laptop. What I usually have open is a browser and an editor to take notes or read notes from. But what I would probably want to use is a browser and Microsoft OneNote.

Microsoft OneNote is a note taking application made by Microsoft. It is designed to be a common note taking area that can be used by multiple people concurrently and at my job we occasionally use it to share information. But it is also just very well built for taking and organizing notes. One of my co-workers has done a survey of all kinds of note taking software and says that Microsoft OneNote is a level above the rest in terms of handling note organization. Alhough I have not done a similar survey, I do attest to the fact the OneNote is a very good application for organizing information. Unfortunately it costs money. Fortunately I get it free with my MSDN (MicroSoft Developers Network) account.

So OneNote for taking down information and storing information. I would also have a browser for several reasons. One is to access Javascript applications. I use one to track initiative and one to handle hidden group roles like Search, Spot, Listen, Sense Motive and so on. I usually have a pane open to the SRD and one open to the game wiki. I use a free wiki hosting site to hold information for my game and put up optional rules, experience, game info and so on there. Players also theretically keep there characters there as well. Although I have been lax on updating the wiki for anything but XP lately.