I need a new laptop, can anyone beat this for around $599
 

What do you think:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...sku=T78-156401

Pretty good specs for the price. Couple of things come to mind:
- Kinda low resolution
- Not touch screen
- Not SSD

I have bunch of Win8 machines. I find the desktop machines without touchscreens ok to use. I keep finding myself wanted to touch the screen on any laptop machine with Win8.

I recently put a SSD drive in a 6 year old laptop running Win8. It boots in under 20 seconds now. Plus the fan hardly ever comes now, so much quieter. My main laptop is an i5 8GB with 256SSD in it, it boots in about 8 seconds running WIn8.

Our kitchen/wife's Laptop is the same resolution as that Toshiba, I find I want a bit more screen height.

here is another one i found, bigger screen and harddrive, same price
http://www.costco.com/HP-ENVY-dv7-La...100040462.html

so tax from costco would be around $40, i found this one on amazon, free shipping, no tax for 699.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...=ATVPDKIKX0DER

it seems like the big difference in ones i am looking at AMD Quad-Core A10-4600M vs i7-3630QM quad core.

any advice on processors

I don't have any meaningful input on processors. Other than a little home video editing I do very little CPU intensive stuff.

At work I have a quad I5 Laptop and it's pretty fast.
I also have a 12 core Xeon 3.2GHz desktop machine at work with 16GBs memory, pretty sure it's never been over 10% CPU. I'll try editing some video with it to see what happens. It has Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel, Word, OneNote, Project, Spotify, IE, and several other apps open right now and sitting around 2% CPU with spikes up to 7% running Win8.

Have a i5 laptop and i3 all in one at home, both seem about the same speed wise. The i3 has 6gb memory and the i5 has 4gbs.
Have a Surface RT which is AMD, but that's a different beast than what you are looking at.

Can you tell where I work at? ;)

I don't remember what's in my other machines at home. They are older so not the current gen Intel or AMD chips.

hp probooks are really easy to get to run OSX if that's even worth considering.

Everyone has their own opinion, but I've always preferred Intel processors over AMD. It's been my experience that AMD processors run hotter, especially in laptops. When I build desktops, I also use Intel boards whenever possible.