The last laptop I purchased was 2005 and quite a bit has changed since then? How important is it to go with a mobile processor for a laptop? Is there any difference?
Mobile platforms will give better battery life and take away a little performance relative to same-gen desktops. Four years is a good upgrade cycle - anything you buy now will be worlds better in pretty much every way than what you bought then.
If you want to compare the benchmarks between mobile and desktop check out this http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php Intel uses the T series for laptops.
Thanks Random, Pretty much figured that would be the answer. The reason I asked this, was that a while back (around late 2002) I blindly bought a laptop with an AMD processor which kept over-heating and frequently led to a hard shutdown of the computer. I was later told that the processor had been designed for a desktop.
Stay away from the Atom CPU, it's dog-slow. They traded away too much processing power for battery-life. Come on, who's going to be using their laptop for 8-12 hrs straight without needing a break? I'd rather keep mine plugged in and get some decent performance out of it. Stay with the Core2Duo models.