I'm rocking out an i5 at the moment All Lynnfield cpu's are 2.5G plus 4-core processors and fairly chunky L2 and L3 caches.
Also:

does anyone know anything about the new Intel chips (the i-series, i3, i5, i7) and how they compare to the Dual Core and Core-2 processors?

so i'm quite tempted to get a Dell studio as then I can get this cover



not sure i can justify the extra £90 for it though

Laptops are still pretty much unupgradeable sadly... At the moment I would say Dell are giving some of the best offers around (all the adware that comes on them really subsidises the price), though they do have several annoying proprietry things (chargers is the one that jumps to mind). Suse got a 17" widescreen one for about £600 about 6 months ago, it runs pretty nicely (even though its Vista) and decent spec (dual core ~3Ghz, 4Gb ram, ~7hr battery).

The best route for decent hardware and compatibility is get a mac and put windows 7 on it... Mac hardware is great but the software is such a pain...

"We Were Exploding Anyway" - Epic title!

fairy snuff. can you buy easily upgradable laptops with affordable change-in change-out components? tbh I don't know much about laptops.

even so, I can't really afford it - it's a non-starter

It's not the looks that I'd recommend it on. I just think they hold their value and performance better over time - i.e. I reckon it will outperform any windows laptop you buy after four years

I thought you might, but it's not worth the money- I'd rather it was functional than just looked pretty

I might actually recommend a Mac...