A suitable laptop for running PASW (SPSS)

Hi all,

After two degrees and seven years of using my trusty Dell laptop, it's time to buy a new one as I'm about to do another degree and I think I need to lay the poor thing to rest.

I've been looking at the Inspiron 15R on the Dell website that has the 2nd Gen Intel Core i3-2310m 2.10Ghz (I have tried and tried to get my head around what this means but have failed miserably). I'm comparing this against the Inspiron 15R on the PC World website which has a Intel Pentium processor. Both have 500GB hard drive and 4GB of memory. The only other glaringly obvious differences are about £50 price, weight and where it comes from. I won't be using it for gaming, but will of course use it for searching the internet etc.

I'm doing a science based doctorate so will need my computer to be running things like PASW (previously SPSS, statistics software) and flicking through pdfs/word documents etc. Does anyone know if one of the laptops I have listed would do this better than the other, or can anyone think of a better laptop to buy for running such software (it doesn't have to be Dell)? Several of my friends have had trouble running PASW alongside any other programs at the same time without it crashing their laptops - I too had this problem in the latter years with my own laptop (the crashing problem could of course be a reflection of the software and not the laptops, but PASW does seem to run better on PCs).

I haven't bought a laptop for such a long time that I feel I don't really know where to start other than with a brand I've used before and a budget of no more than £500. I would greatly appreciate any help with this issue!

Thank you.