need notebook advice....

I'm going to college soon, and I'm in the market for a laptop now. I wish I knew more about notebooks...Anyway, my budget will be nothing over $600.

Heres where I need help. I know that I like gaming, but I don't plan on doing any high end gaming (obviously not with a $550 laptop budget; apparently, integrated graphics still suck :[ ). How do the Pentium Dual cores (I think they're based on old C2D's?) stack up to turions? I would rather get a c2d, but it seems like all of the budget cpu's are Pentiums... T2370 and T2330 pops up a lot.

I'm thinking 2 gb of ram will be good for Vista, but is that a little overboard?

I've looked at Best Buy, Circuit City, Dell.com, Gateway, HP's site, Compaq, Office Depot... am I missing anything?

Will my best bet be to just wait for a good deal in the Sunday Ads at the above?

Thanks guys!

2 gigs of RAM would probably be ideal for vista on a 32bit OS, mostly on a budget. I think the stores you listed will be the best places to find a laptop like that.

Just to note, the "Pentium Dual Cores"...if I remember correctly, they are in fact Core 2 Duo architecture, just with a lot of hacked off cache and things like that. Nobody quote me on this though They should probably perform about the same as Turions, methinks.

alright, sounds good, thanks for the info guys.

I'm just going to keep my eye out for a deal . . . the sunday ads every week seem to be getting closer and closer to what i want