>>One thing to keep in mind is that for us foxpro programmers the hard disk implementation (usually mostly characterized by the chipset) can be more influential than for most office workers. And especially in laptops you sometimes find the very old chipsets in amd-cpu machines.
>
>From my experience, disk I/O is dependent on a lot of factors other than the CPU.

Yes, that was my point (perhaps not very clearly argumented for <g>): Even if the Amd cpu chips are better, sometimes the INtel combination of cpu *and* chipset can run rings around the (faster) Amd cpu on disk-IO bound tasks. I came across this fist in the days of the PIII / Thunderbird days (the old Intel BX was phantastic piece of well rounded engineering), and this came up (not so markedly) again recently when evaluating laptop replacements. As much as I like the Athlon64 as a well designed all around chip ranging from multi core workstation (that great memory interface) down to competitive mobile solutions (that nice power saving stuff included in the whole family), the problem I see is the sometimes very unbalanced total machine in laptop solutions, especially in the lower cost section. If you find a well balanced amd machine, you will have a better machine than one using Intel HW. But it is more work <g>.

regards

thomas