feature wise, hp better?

(my reply somehow just didn't show up, retyping now)
i don't know which brand is better though, probably ibm? i think pc's nowadays all have u***** 2.0, especially with a pentium m 1.8 so check on their site.
256 will not be not enough for you to run xp pro efficiently.
That ibm doesn’t seem to be well balanced…

bought a toshiba satellite for my wife's parents, it has 256 ram, that's thing is unbelievably slow!

my friend bought a 700m the 1.6 m cpu is comparable to a 3g cpu in integer op, float is slower, i guess 1.4 and 1.8 will be enough for your needs

Check with your friends before you shell out the money. I bet you will need to buy another 256ram(when it’s cheap). Don’t forget your cancellation fee is worth just 256mb ram.

if you want, you can run sandra to get some performance figure and share it with us. wanted to see how the pentium m performs