Centrino is not a procesor, it's a marketing sham
Centrino is what Intel calls it's new mobile solution
based around the Celeron M (phu yuck) and the Pentium M (mmm...wholesome Pentium M goodness)
Celeron M laptops are cheap
Pentium M laptops are very expensive
both get good battery life, as their CPU's designed from the ground up for mobile use (following Intel's normal design standards, the Celeron M is based off the Pentium M, which is based off the Pentium III, which is why it's such a good CPU)
i would say your "i need it to load instantly" request can be handled easily
you don't need a Pentium M for that
and btw
nothing with a comptuer is instantanious, so please, don't expect it to be
but i can certainly understand you not wanting it to be slow in the sense that it takes it 5 minutes to load Word, which would make it horribly un-productive
you also need to understand that for a laptop to get online you need an internet connection and either a wire going to it, or a Wi-Fi router and an add in card (Centrino equipped notebooks sometimes feature onboard Wi-Fi reception, which would mean you don't need the card)
as gaming is not something you want to do, I would suggest this notebook
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?description=34-115-171&depa=3
The AMD Sempron 3000-M should be easily capable of anything you'll need, and should give you decent battery life
if you need more battery life, consider this guy:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=34-115-181&depa=3
it's basically trading the Mobile Sempron for a Pentium M 715
and trading slow integrated graphics, for slow integrated graphics...from a different company
if you want more power on all fronts
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=34-114-127&depa=3
that Toshiba should deliver with flying colors, Radeon X600 (around GeForce 6200 level of power), faster Pentium M, 60GB HDD, 512MB of DDR
all the notebooks i've suggested use 512MB of DDR
i'd say 512MB is the minimum
this one would offer more CPU performance, but less graphics power:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=34-110-148&depa=3
save with this one:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=34-146-046&depa=3
this would probably be another quick book:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=34-224-004&depa=3
larger HDD, more RAM, and a faster CPU than anything previously shown, i'm not sure how the X600np stacks up to the Mobility Radeon 9700 though...
basically same thing but from Acer:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=34-115-180&depa=3
here is a tablet PC:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=34-148-011&depa=3
better tablet PC:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=34-110-125&depa=3
this one would be a beast, faster than anything else i've suggested this far:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=34-115-178&depa=3
alright, this would be fastest notebook you could buy:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=34-224-008&depa=3
it weighs 12 lbs and probably has less than 4 hours of battery life, it would get hotter than...yeah
it's a DTR, not a notebook
i'd say grab a nice Pentium M book and be happy
With so many laptops to choose from I don't know where to begin.
All I want the laptop to do is word processing, running programs like Matlab or Mathematica and surfing the internet.
Now i understand i can get one that performs all these operations for a low price, however i hate waiting!
When i click the application i want it load almost instantly.
So what kind of laptop should i get? I was told that centrino is great for word processing and has a good battery life. Any opinions?

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