What is the best Laptop hardware recommended for installing Hadoop on windows? I assume I have to install a single node installation, if not please guide me for the correct configuration.
I know you mentioned wanting to install on Windows, but Cloudera is offering single-node Hadoop Linux VM images that can get you up and running in no time. You even have examples and scripts included, it's a very good place to start.
https://www.cloudera.com/downloads.html
(Don't forget to look at the Getting Started section.)
In my opinion, if you want to learn about Big Data and Hadoop, you should also invest some time in familiarising yourself with Linux, as most of the real environments out there are Linux-based.
System Requirements: Per Cloudera page, the VM takes 4GB RAM and 3GB of disk space. This means your laptop should have more than that (I'd recommend 8GB+). Storage-wise, as long as you have enough to test with small and medium-sized data sets (10s of GB), you'll be fine. As for the CPU, if your machine has that amount of RAM you'll most likely be fine. I'm using a single-node crappy Pentium G3210 with 4GB of ram for testing my small jobs and it works just fine.
Later if you outgrow this environment you can simply move to your own pseudo-distributed setup.
Of course, if what I just said makes no sense to you, then you have some reading ahead...