Thank you for all the feedback guys. I am hesitant with HP, I have had bad luck with more then a number of HP machines. Never owned an ACER or MSI. The Lenovo's CS history is a turn off. I was checking out the MSI's last go round.

For the Lenovo, would it be able to run as a pseudo 8-core with the i7? Was able to do that for a little while on a friends i7 920 for a little while. I tend to focus on CPU based projects, hence the question in terms of the MSI's i5 in comparison.

Now, would the feature set on this Toshiba be worth the few extra dollars?: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...scrollFullInfo