Best CPU for Laptop

[coolVariable]

What CPU would you get if you bought a laptop now/around christmas?
(And if you don't want to spend a ton of money and only want something a little faster than a PIII 600 MHz?)

Used mainly for regular stuff (Office etc.), a (very) little MPEG movie encoding, some (very little) gaming.

 

[corkyg]

A mobile PIII at the 800 to 1 GHz range would be very good value.

 

[coolVariable]

What about Celerons?

 

[DaveSimmons]

A mobile p3 celeron in the same range would also be good, though maybe 10% slower than a p3 at the same clock. A mobile p4 celeron (are there any yet?) would suck down the battery life for only a tiny gain in speed (p4-cel-1.6 is not much faster than a p3-cel-1.2 or even true p3 1 GHz).

gaming

note that laptop video is usually not upgradeable except for a few Dell models, so make sure you get geforce or radeon graphics if you plan to do any 3D gaming. A p3 with radeon would smoke a p4 with "intel AGP" in games.

 

[coolVariable]

I hardly do any gaming and if mostly not 3-D shooter, so I think a laptop-graphics chip is enough.

To be honest I'm quite happy with the P3 600 / ATI Rage LT Pro Laptop that I currently have, it is only missing firewire (and the PCMCIA Firewire adapter that I have is giving me so many headaches).
And although it sucks that it takes almost 2 days for it to encode a mpeg2 120 Minute film, I would rather save money and be patient.

But my parents are thinking about getting a laptop and usually my hand-down hardware is enough for them ... so before they go out and buy some high-end laptop which they are never going to use 100%, I might as well get a new one and hand-down my old one.