Don't know whether i3 or i5

I have two laptops both 17" screens and fairly heavy so am thinking of buying a 14 or 15" one that isn't going to cost an arm and a leg for taking on trips.

Now I prefer the i5 but see the i3 models are obviously that much cheaper.

My problem is after working on i3 machines find them dreadfully slow and I am considering dropping an SSD into one if I bought an i3 based machine and even maybe slotting on a spare 7 OEM I have.

So any ideas on choosing the i3?? - if I have to go i5 I will but just want to keep the cost down..

Oh it will only be used for emails, forum and banking.

I'd have thought an i3 would be fine for that usage John, my dad has an i3 just for just net based stuff and light Office stuff and it's perfectly good for him. He has never complained about it being slow, that's on a spinner too.

I don't assume you will do video encoding on trips. And for most of the rest an i3 will be fine.

We just bought an i3 system for friends, dropped a Mushkin SSD in and the system works really well.

For travel I have this little guy that I got for $99. It weighs only 2 pounds, came with an eMMC (a kind of SSD) and a quad core Atom 1.3GHz processor. I am very happy with it. Boots in 25 seconds and all office type applications are very fluent. And as I said, I don't do any video encoding on a trip.

For travel you want to go light. Even a 14" is not all that light. The wife has one but for travel she uses a T100 Transformer. The specs are similar to my little guy but it has touch on top. Both of those little systems have a battery life of over 10 hours. That might be important on a trip.

Here is more on little guys:

Best 11.6 inch laptops and ultrabooks - recommended picks right now

Ok Gav and Wolfgang I will go with the i3 then I'll see how the spinner goes that one comes with and if that is fast enough I'll leave the SSD for later. The best bit is I have found an outlet that gives the option of 7 Pro with an upgrade to 8 DVD but doubt if I will be using that

But thanks again for the heads up.
John:)