If you had a choice between purchasing a Pentium or an AMD Athalon, which would you choose? I'm going to purchase a laptop and can't decide between them. Any suggestions?

Bear in mind that I'm too busy at the moment to do any research, and I have no experience or knowledge with either of these processor lines.

With that said, I'd pick the P4. The Athlon desktop processors have long kept up with Intel's offerings, but at the expense of greater power requirements and more heat dissipation. I can't see that they could have engineered the processor down to a laptop level without sacrificing a significant amount of its computing capability.

P4m's, on the other hand, don't sip much power at all, run cooler, have auto-throttling mechanisms in place to ensure safe operating temperatures, and they're not that sluggish either.

__________________
"And knowing is half the battle!"

Well, in contrast to the previous poster, I'd seriously consider a laptop that uses the Mobile Athlon 4 if you can find one at a good price. It's got the same core as the Athlon XP, so there's no loss in computing power. The mobile version also has power saving features similar to the Intel processors.

You'll probably find a lot more notebooks available with the Pentium. But Compaq and HP do have ones with the mobile Athlon 4. You may find an Athlon-based notebook that performs well at a lower price than a comparable Pentium-based notebook. I guess it just comes down to which notebook has the features you want at the best price.

__________________
Athlon XP 1900+
Shuttle AK31A motherboard
512MB Corsair CAS2 PC2400 RAM
Chaintech GT61 GeForce4 Ti 4600
2 x 40 GB W. Digital 7200 RPM drives
Promise FastTrak RAID controller
TDK 16/10/40 CD-Writer
Pioneer 16x DVD
Lian-Li PC61 case with window
Philips Acoustic Edge sound card
Klipsch ProMedia v.2-400 speakers

GO FOR ATHLON!