Buying a Laptop - Help! (Processors)

ArcSyn

So I'm looking for a laptop for my sister-in-law to use. It's gotta have a DVD drive and enough graphical power (and the outputs) to output video to a 40" TV so she can watch Hulu, Netflix, and DVDs on it. I had one at Staples I had decided on, but by the time I had decided to buy it and went into the store, it was sold out and no longer available...

I'm looking for something fairly basic, but all these processors are ridiculous, and I was wondering if there's any I should avoid. I'm seeing Intel Pentium Dual Core T4400s, AMD Neo2 X2's, AMD Athlon II M320s, Intel Pentium i3s, etc. I would imagine that any recent processor is going to be more than enough for media, internet, and general use. She's not going to be using this to make home videos or game on, but I would like it to stay decently well specced for a few years so I'm thinking 3-4GB of RAM would be best with Win7 64bit.

So what mobile processors are good or should be avoided?

Oh, and the budget is up to $700 max, but something more in the $500-600 range would be preferred.

GnomeTank

This is entirely conjecture, but I would avoid the AMD Turon line of mobile processors. My wife had a recent HP with a Turon, and it ran so hot, that it actually shipped from HP down clocked. When I went in to the BIOS and up clocked it to it's true speed, it would run so hot it would hurt her legs, and then died about six months later from the CPU going tits up. Again, completley conjecture, but I would stick to Intel pieces right now. My Intel Core 2 laptop has no such issues running at it's true max speed. It's warm, but it's not scary hot, and the system hasn't died in six months.

ArcSyn

Which is funny because I just sent in my work laptop back to Dell because my Intel Core 2 Duo keeps overheating and down clocking itself. But yeah, I get what you're saying. I'll avoid the Turon models then. There weren't too many of them anyway.

GnomeTank

ArcSyn wrote: »

Which is funny because I just sent in my work laptop back to Dell because my Intel Core 2 Duo keeps overheating and down clocking itself. But yeah, I get what you're saying. I'll avoid the Turon models then. There weren't too many of them anyway.

And honestly, it could be just HP. I'm sure the Turon processors are fine in and of themselves. I was just really pissed when I found out that HP was shipping a laptop advertised as "2.1ghz" at what amounted to 1050mhz (which half clocked itself to 500mhz whenever the power plug was taken out), and when I upclocked it back to it's real clock speed, it basically fried itself.

Not AMD's fault directly, but the fact that Turon's tend to run hotter than Core 2's certainly didn't help the situation.

Satsumomo

Avoid non-45nm die processors, 45nm are the cooler of the bunch.