OK it turns out I'm horribly out of touch. Mrs Mongoose needs a shiney new laptopamabob, and I'm lost in a see of Core i-insert number heres and AMD Turions.

Looking to spend ~£350-450, no gaming or similar, just home office type jobs plus photo editing. The only thing I'm really out of touch on is CPUs. For this price range I seem to be looking at a choice between Intel Pentium, Intel Core i3 and Core i5 all in the ~2-2.3GHz range.

How much difference is there between these chips at comparable MegaHurtz? If I go Pentium/low end i3 I can get bigger screens/HDDs/RAM, but I don't want to be hamstrung by the CPU. Equally I don't want a top notch CPU which is throttled by 2GB of slow ass RAM. I want a nice ballanced machine, but I don't see where that is ATM

If you want a fast laptop IMO the most important component is an SSD, you can have a ninja fast CPU but at the end of the day if it's being crippled by a slow ass HDD you just wasted your money.


i5s are a great shout though 

i3s are slightly quicker than the core2duos of old, the i5s are the daddy, get an i5 if you can and purchase some RAM for cheap!

SSDs will beef up the spec, but if its for the Mrs I expect she wont appreciate it!

A good i3 will perform just as nicely for basic tasks as an i5 so if the budget is tight I'd shoot for an SSD + i3 combo over an i5 + mechanical drive. In either case, hefty amounts of RAM is also good, but RAM is a cheap and easy upgrade option so if you get a good spec thats short of RAM you can always get another stick later so long as you ensure there's room on the board.

It is not just about spec though, what screen size you want and what is the role of the laptop? For that price you may struggle a little to get a decent one with decent screen resolution and not one that weighs a ton.
If it is things like just web, emails, some app use, odd typing of document etc then looking at a tablet may be a better option.

Everything is to much spec these days.
What are you going to use it for? That is the most important thing.