Applications:
Standard office functions plus Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004
(and X). When used with the sim software, the laptop will be
driving a good quality 19" LCD panel.

The P4 Northwood laptop is a vanilla HP on XP Home, 1GB RAM, and
a 5400RPM drive. Video card is the integrated Radeon 9100 with
shared memory.

The CoreDuo laptop is a vanilla Dell on Vista Premium, but with
a Core Duo processor T2080, 2GB RAM, also a 5400RPM drive. Video
is Dell's integrated, to support the WXGA+ display.

I need to advise a colleague which of these two laptops will be
used in evaluating/using his flight simulator software, which he
is modifying for a specialized purpose. There are substantial
differences in the programming required by the two laptops, and
reverting later will be costly and time-consuming, so a decision
must be made in advance. In this application, speed is important.

Are there benchmark tests I can do now to estimate which of the
two laptops would be more suitable?

Thanks!