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Please, stop the FUD. The Geforce 8600 is not only easily 2x faster than an integrated Intel X3100, it's easily 20x faster. Have a look at a few benchmarks and judge yourselves. http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Graphics-Media-Accelerator-X3100.2176.0.html http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/graphics-cards/3dmark06-v1-0-2-hdr-sm3-0-score,538.html Note that Intel tends to optimize it's chips for these kinds of benchmarks, realworld performance their chips tend to perform even worse than Nvidia or Ati's chips.

I just bought a budget laptop, I tried to comparable models one with a intel X3100 (best integrated today) the other with a ATI HD 2400 (worst dedicated).
You can't even compare those two cards, even if the hd2400 is ridiculously underpowered (i'm used to desktop gaming cards, the HD2400 is like an oldie 9700 Pro) the intel is two or four times *worse*.
You can't expect to play even old games on high res screen with a x3100...

Check this page to compare notebook graphics:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

3Dmark06 benchmark:
x3100 = 474
hd2400 = 1348
hd2400xt = 1738

Of course it depends on what the GP means by "will stand up just fine", if he means "will be a lot worse but still be enough for 2d desktop" that's ok...

I know we love a good MS bash here, but c'mon - a Core 2 Duo E6700. With two gigs of ram.

And it has a sluggish interface.

There really is no honestly viable excuse.

Here's a mips count on the T5600. It's claiming 22305 Mips. (The T5600 is a good comparison point according to pricewatch, they're within maybe twenty bucks of each other - couldn't find a mips report on the E7600. Close enough for my point though. And yes, I know the Mips count from Dhrystone isn't exact either. But it's good enough for a ballpark discussion.)

Ok, so that's 22,305,000,000 instructions per second. Let's say we have a 1024x768 screen. That's 786432 pixels. Let's say we're refreshing 60 times per second. That's a total of 47185920 pixels to give a good user experience. And that's if you're drawing them with the cpu, manually. And let's say it takes two commands to move a pixel. Fetch from memory, and put to memory. That means you'll need 94371840 instructions to update the screen per second to do it. Please note that this is a worst case scenario - you're drawing everything by hand. Your graphics card isn't a GeForce 8800, it's a VGA card from the early 80's.

So looking at the instruction count, that's only 47185920/22305000000*100% = .42% of the total cpu's processing ability.

What the fuck could possibly be taking so much attention from the processor that it can't spare a measly half of a percent to refresh the damn screen?

Honestly, the cpu power we have these days is nothing short of staggering. We shouldn't have these kinds of problems at all, ever.

It's not really clear what your point is, but the walmart machine has a slower CPU (check benchmarks at tomshardware or any other hardware review site) and a slightly worse graphics card. On the plus side, you get a DVD burner (which dell frequently offers as a free upgrade) with lightscribe and a 40GB larger hard drive. For me, the last two items just don't matter on a laptop.

On a slightly lower end machine (with the 945GM video), 83 fps