i'm trying to figure what is the fastest? is the centrino technology faster and does it give a longer battery life too? or is the pentium4 faster? also, i'd like to be able to use it for gaming too and i know amd's are generally better for gaming. i found this one on buy.com http://www.buy.com/retail/computers/product.asp?loc=212&sku=10348329 selling for 1900. it looks really good...can anyone give me some advice on what to look for and where to start? i don't really care about how heavy the notebook is either...i just want as much power as i can get for around 2000 or less.
Centrino technology isn't faster, but it will generally get more battery life. The main reason why it gets more battery life is because of the CPU used. Also note, that there are notebooks that use the same cpu, but cannot be branded 'centrino' because they do not use Intel's wireless solution, which I don't think really impacts battery life that much, it's mainly the cpu. Regarding performance, Pentium4 should be faster in most applications, so if you want to go gaming P4 would be a better choice. Personally, I don't think there's a big difference between AMD and Intel for gaming, the key component is the video card. You'll probably want at least the Nvidia GeForce 5600 or ATI Radeon 9600. If size is not an object, and it appears not to be since the one you linked is a 17" behemoth, you should consider the HP ZD700. From the HP website, you can configure it similarly to the Toshiba you mentioned, and use have the Nvidia 5600 Geforce with 64MB of VRAM for a slightly lower price than the Toshiba model. Notebooks are a very subjective purchase, so it'd be good for you to go into a store and get a good idea for the look and feel of the unit.
For hyperthreading, it really depends on the situation. In some cases, it can actually hurt performance because of the extra overhead that it requires, and usually isn't very beneficial if you're only running one application at a time. It comes in much more handy if an application is written to specifically support hyperthreading, or if you are running more than one application at a time.
