CPU power is probably the last thing I'd worry about in a laptop, they're usually comparatively more underpowered in terms of HDD speed/space, amount of RAM, and especially graphics. The turion is AMD's mobile version of the athlon, it's comparable to the core 2 duos in power usage, but is quite a bit slower in performance. That said, at any given price point on a laptop, I'd rather have more ram, a faster hard drive, or better graphics over a faster cpu. (well, the atoms and via cpus and anything single core are a bit underpowered, but everything else is fine)