Laptops - 3 years ago and today

So I figured it was time to get a new laptop, my old trustworthy Dell Inspiron 8600 has done a great job but it's starting to show it's age, it's actually 3 years old on the day next week (Yes, remembering the exact date you bought your last laptop is weird, I know). My 8600 had a few scratches and marks but it still looks pretty ok. Performance wise it's not to bad, I've been running Open Solaris for the last 18 months and it's been working great, felt fast and snappy. But when it comes to heavy multi tasking, Solaris container and VMWare it's not really keeping up with times.
After browsing the laptop market it was quite clear that getting a Core2 machine was the best option if I wanted performance. I was very tempted to get a cool Acer Ferrari 4006, the price is pretty great now when the 5000-series is just around the corner, but the AMD ML-40 benchmarks put me off, the Core2 totally trash it. Since my old Dell has been working great I went and got a new Dell to replace it. Although I was looking for a smaller machine this time I actually went for pretty much the exact replacement for the 8600, the new Dell Inspiron 6400. Funny thing, the price of the new machine turned out to be pretty much exactly the same as I payed for my old machine.

	Dell Inspiron 6400	Dell Inspiron 8600
CPU	Intel Core2 Duo 2.0Ghz	Intel Pentium M 1.4GHz
Memory	2048Mb	768Mb
Disk	120Gb 5400rpm	30Gb 5400rpm
Graphics	ATI X1400 128MB	Nvidia Geforce 5250Go
Network	54Mbit wifi + 100Mbit wired	11Mbit Wifi + 100Mbit wired
Optical	DVD+RW	DVD/CD+RW
Pointing device	Touchpad	Touchpad / poiting stick
Screen	1680x1050 high gloss	1680x1050
Weight	2.8 kg	3.1 kg
Size	A bit smaller	Quite big
VMWare speed	Fast	Slow

It's quite nice to be able to boot up a CentOS 4.4 running 10gR2 and still have great performance. Both in the VM and in the host OS.
The one thing I don't like is that the 6400 don't have the pointing stick thingy, just the touch pad. But I'm getting used to it.