could you please tell me if a AMD Turion is equal to a Centrino 2 or a Core 2 duo? 2 salesmen have told us conflicting answers. i am buying a laptop for home and manily internet use. Would appreciate you opinion. thankyou.
Turion is slightly lower than a Core 2 Duo. Keep in mind that Centrino is a mobile processor branding that uses a Core 2 Duo processor (Penryn).
For the most part, Core 2 Duo is better than Turion, as Turion seems to run a bit too hot for my liking, and the performance isnt as good at C2D either.
However, if you want to keep the cost as low as possible, for normal everyday work you shouldn't see a huge difference between C2D and Turion.
For normal usage, as you described, AMD is as good as any Core 2 Duo. You have to keep in mind the energy consumption though which shall reflect on battery life.
AMD is struggling in this generation to strike a balance between power consumption and performance.
Here is a very useful link that ranks all the Mobile/Desktop CPUs.