I've been out of the IT game for a few years and thus have not been keeping up with new processor technology much. I am now in a field where I could really use a tablet PC instead of a standard notebook for the purposes of the tablet and for the battery life a lot of them are known to support. My question in writing this post is pertaining primarily to speed.

My current system is a Thinkpad T43 Centrino @ 2Ghz with 1.5GB's of RAM on WinXP Pro. I think the HD is a 5,400RPM drive. This system is fine for most of what I do, outlook, internet; general office stuff. But when I need to rip a CD in iTunes, or work with some video editing stuff, basically all I can do is that one task and that's it or the system slows to a crawl and/or locks up or causes malfunctions in the program that's taxing the CPU (like in iTunes, if I have outlook open while ripping a CD I get these glitches throughout the entire CD).

So, time for a new system, preferrably a tablet. The ones I'm thinking of are the inexpensive choice, the HP's with the AMD Turion 64 X2 CPU's or the yet to be released (and EXPENSIVE!) Dell XT Tablet PC running the 1.2Ghz Core 2 Duo ULV CPU.

I would get either system with 2GB's of RAM and the fastest drive possible (probably not solid state on the Dell though as the system is already rather expensive and that solid state drive tosses in another $500 - $1000). Either system I would likely get with Windows Vista Ultimate.

My problem with the Dell is 2 fold. It's very pricey starting at $2,500 and the 1.2Ghz CPU just sounds painful; but it's a Dell and I have loads of respect for Dell products coming from the IT industry.

My problem with the HP is I've never owned an HP computer before and I'm not so sure about their tablets in general. They are incredibly cheaper than the Dell (& IBM/Lenovo's for that matter) and I would be concerned that I would get what I pay for so to speak.

The only reason I am not considering the IBM/Lenovo's is because I get a corporate discount on the Dell's that's substantial through a company I still do some contract work and frankly, other than the cool look of the IBM/Lenovo's and the keyboard that kicks ass by comparison to the Dell's, I'm not all that impressed with them, at least not enough to stay "loyal" to them.

Also, if anyone knows of any benchmarks out there comparing the performance of the 1.2Ghz Core 2 Duo ULV's to the non ULV Core 2 Duo CPU's (at 1.2 and higher speeds like 2Ghz+) and the AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual Cores that would be extremely helpful, I haven't been able to find any online. I just want to see how much of a performance difference there really is. Also considering I'd be going from a 2Ghz single core with little cache to a dual core with, what like 4 times the cache, would I see an increase in speed, decrease? About the same? just better multitasking and no real speed increase in any particular application?

Any and all info would be appreciated! Thanks!