You need to look at battery life. Toshiba notebooks are pretty harsh there. I've seen some models that will last an hour on battery. Some may have higher life like 2-3 hours, but watch for those. I agree that Toshiba makes pretty affordable performance laptops, but a drain on battery.
I would recommend getting the Centrino Penium M instead of the Turion 64. Pentium M uses less watts to power their prower their CPUs compared to Turion CPU, has better raw power than Turion, and just darn faster. I've seen benchmarks that show Pentium M system have boot times 30 seconds faster than the Turion 64. Same model laptops with different CPUs to test this (CompUSA printed me out the specs and review sheet. Don't know how to make this available to you, but you have to take my work for it). So make sure you get a Centrino Mobile processor. They do good for now.
Turion 64 may change with Windows Vista or Windows XP x64 or better yet, Linux. Fast. On battery life, Pentium M just OWNS.
That Sony laptop is petty good. 3.5 hours average on battery life. I've seen that displayed before and it is so sweet. I wanted that one but cost too much for me. Get it.
Bit over a Student's budget though, should probably make a new thread and tell us about it there! Wouldn't mind knowing what it is like.
