Laptop's for Small Business, need help!

The AMD is more of a lower power CPU, not as fast as the i5, but will have longer battery life and is probably cheaper. For general use, documents, videos watching, etc... the AMD is fine.

Hello aloys24;

If you look at the Big List of Mobile Processors (CPU Benchmarks) you'll find the i5-2430M ranked @ #44 and the A8-3500M ranked #136.
The AMD A8-3500M quad core APU trades some CPU horsepower to get a better graphics option - Radeon HD 6620G - on the APU package. Still, a capable performer and worthy of consideration if you get a very good price break over the i5 models.

For a business class multi-tasking workload I would go with the Intel Core i5-2430M. That HD 3000 Graphics on the CPU is roughly equivalent to a Radeon HD 5450 or Geforce 310 dedicated graphics card from a couple years back.

In general Dell tries to target the Lattitude at businesses since they tend to keep the models in production/support longer, and they make them to be hauled to/from the office every day.

The Vostro line was introduced to bring a lower-cost option to the business market.

If your users will actually be hauling them around, spend the extra cash now and go with the Latitude line.

Also: For business-use, I don't think you'd notice much use between the i3/i5/A8, they are all more than fast enough for office work.

The 'natural' competitor to the Vostro 3550 would be the HP Probook 4530s and is probably worth a close look:
HP ProBook 4530s Review
Dell Vostro 3550 Review

Thanks for the responses guys!

I still can't make up my mind, haha!

No problem there. Hard to go wrong. You're only looking at excellent choices.

Also, with no IT department, you probably want to get a 3 yr warranty for them.

That link shows it as an i5, and the cost is not that much for a good business laptop. The Lenovo T420 models we get where I work start at about $1,000.

I ended up going with the Latitude E6420's. They had a special deal through the AICPA, so they only ended up costing $1300 a piece, including the extra $400 for 2010 office professional. They have the new i5 in them which is nice, and they come with the 3 year warranties which is the main reason I went Latitude over Vostro.

Thanks for all the reply's I think everyone will be happy with there new laptops!