Dell or HP laptop?

[groovilator]

So I got this cruise gig that sort of landed in my lap a couple of days ago and I ship out in less than three weeks so I need a laptop quick! It will be a multipurpose laptop and I will be doing lots of recording - songwriting ideas as well as recording and crafting scratch tracks for the album I just started working on which I'll rerecord when I get back home in four months. (I'll be using my Mbox 2 with this.) So I'm shopping for the most reliable machine and I'm looking at two used laptops:

Dell Inspiron E1705 w/ Core 2 Duo @ 1.6 Ghz
1 GB of RAM
80 GB hard drive

or

HP NX9420 w/ Intel Pentium 4 @ 3.4 Ghz
512 MB of RAM (which I'll be upgrading to 1 GB)
90 GB hard drive

The HP will require a new battery and the RAM upgrade. Altogether I'll end up spending around the same amount for either machine. The HP obviously has higher specs but it's my understanding that the Duo Core processor is actually twice as fast as what it's rating is. If this is true, then these two machines would be almost exactly the same after the HP upgrade. So at that point it becomes a reliability issue. Which one could I really count on in the long term? This is very important to me because it really will be my primary computing tool for at least the next year.
Any help?? Please????

[groovilator]

yeah, I'm bumping but I also wanted to emphasize this question which may have a big impact on my final decision: does a dual processor do a better job of handling multiple functions than a single processor that's twice as fast? My biggest dilemma right now is that I have been reading so many disparaging remarks about Dell - and have seen for myself a friend of mine have massive problems with a Dell - which makes me lean very heavily toward the HP. But that dual processor sounds so enticing .....
my budget is very limited so I'm pretty much stuck with the options that are on the table