Option 2, $1600:

Intel Core 2 Duo T5450 (1.66GHz)

Vista Home Premium

NVidia GeForce Go 8400M GS w/ 128Mb DDR2 Dedicated Memory

1Gb of RAM (upgradeable to 2Gb for an extra $150)

All other core specs are essentially the same.

Now, what I'm interested to know is:

 - Will the aesthetic bells and whistles in Windows Vista okay with that integrated graphics controller? I'm guessing that having ample system RAM (2Gb) would allow plenty of memory for that 'hypermemory' feature to draw on, but would it have enough grunt for Vista's graphics hungry user interface?

 - Is 2Gb of system memory really necessary for a machine that will only be used for the absolute basics? Is Windows Vista such a resource hog that there would be an appreciable difference in performance between 1Gb and 2Gb of RAM even if the machine is only going to be used for the purposes described above?

From the benchmarks that I've seen it would be fair to say that the Core 2 Duo would fairly comfortably outperform the Turion X2 but I don't think it really matters in this case, so I'd be really interested to hear some thoughts with regard to the graphics and system RAM options.