New laptop choices

I'm going to be buying a new Toshiba laptop when Win 7 becomes available preinstalled. The way I use my machine is that everything I do is done in VMware VM's.

The most demanding program I use is Delorme Street Atlas which runs on a XP 64bit VM.

So, I'm looking for recommendations.

Should I go for a dual core processor? And does AMD or Intel make any significant difference?

Hard drive: Will a 7200 rpm drive give me noticeable better performance over the standard 5400 rpm drive?

Win 7: Might I be better off getting Vista with a free upgrade to Win 7 so I can do a clean install without all the bloatware?

RAM: I've been using 4G of RAM with a Win 7 64 bit system which seems to be adequate, would I get any advantage out of 6Gigs?

And if there's anything else you can think of let me know.

TIA

In my experience, the 7200 RPM drive will have a noticeable performance benefit. It will drain the battery faster though.

Absolutely go for dual core, it makes a big difference with virtual machines. And you would benefit from 6 gigs IMO, virtualisation uses RAM like it's going out of fashion. I'm seriously thinking about 12 gigs for my next desktop build, because of the amount of memory VMs use.