HP is a pretty good company if you ask me. I've got a couple of friends who have hp laptops, and they seem to like it so far. But make sure you are able to take care of it though, one of my friend's laptop had a little 'accident' (or that's what he said) and the hard drive got busted. And the next thing you know we were trying to recover all the data from it.

Since HP Pavilions are made for desktop replacements (kind of) they might not be all that portable if you plan on taking them around a lot.

As for the processor, I would go with AMD, and if I were you I would try to get myself one of the Turion's or Athlons because of their dual core abilities, because to me it looks like it's worth it if you are going to use this laptop for a while.

Semprons are fine, however they are like Intel Celeron chips, so they are going to be cheaper (ie you can't compare them to pentium4 with 4ghz). And the Intels are more expensive because they have more power.

If you really want a core duo then it's best to get it. But if you're just going to use it for normal browsing and light gaming, then there isn't a whole lot of benefits except faster and newer technology...