the Core 2 Duo totally kicks posterior on laptop performance - not that the Turion is a slouch by any means, but I see both pieces of kit on a daily basis and purely from my own experience I can assure you that on pure performance, the Intel option is significantly superior.

However (there's always an "however" isn't there?) it's not just processor "horsepower" that counts towards overall performance - amount of RAM, speed of RAM, motherboard bus, graphics adaptor, all these things add up, and cheap nasty ones can bottleneck even the beefiest processor, as well as all the rubbish laptop manufacturers shove in to the software suite on startup. Let's say you have a laptop supplied with 512mb RAM, and for graqphics you choose to set it to 256mb for video memory - immediately you have a problem as, since graphics memory in laptops is usually shared from the pool of installed RAM with the system memory, you've cut down your available system memory by half. So as well as a thumping processor, make sure you have plenty of quick RAM in it or you'll find yourself wondering "what was the point of that big fast processor? "

Thanks for the advice, Taw... I'm splurging for the 2 gigs of RAM and a separate 256mb GeForce Go 7600 video card so that shouldn't be too much of a problem. I knew there had to be a caveat to the lower prices of AMD.

not as such. the AMDs are lean mean machines, although I've never agreed with the way they name and market their processors, which is misleading. One could argue that AMD make the more efficient processor.