Verified answer

The i5 may have better processing speed but is probably a dual core processor. The i7 has a little less processing speed but is quad core. The i7 will be able to manage better multitasking needs. No application by itself can use up all four cores(normal ones). If you are buying a laptop wait a little while for the haswell micro-architecture to be released with this you will get 50% less power consumption and 10-15% processing speeds(which looks like is your problem). The released problems will obiously have a premium so wait until the end of summer(back to school sales) or buy an ivy bridge for really cheap.

Clock speed (GHz) is a relative measure of computation speed only among processors of similar architecture. The clock speed does not translate directly into instruction execution rate, because typically many clock cycles are required to execute a complete instruction, and some instructions take more cycles than others.

The number of cores is a relative measure of potential execution speed only if the software being executed can make use of multiple cores to obtain some degree of parallelism in execution.

I suggest going to PC World and looking at their benchmark test results for computation speed. This is about the only way to compare different processor architectures. Results will of course depend to some extent on whether the benchmark programs can make effective use of multiple processor cores.

i7 have hyperthreading...

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architectur...