15" old MBP vs 13.3" new MBA? worth buying?

[suethedino]

I have a mid 2008 MBP - 15" 2.4Ghz C2D/4G RAM/200G HDD/256 GeForce 8600. I mostly use my mbp for word/powerpoint/excel etc plus some photo editing with photoshop/illustrator/aperture. I also have VMware fusion installed to run a few windows apps. I really love my mbp and it still works great. Only issue I am having now is that I am commuting almost 3 hrs everyday by using public transportation and carrying mbp everyday to work is certainly hurting my back and shoulder. Because of this reason, I've been eying on new mba to come out but C2D in the new model was a huge disappointment. But, after reading some of the reviews, I think it may not be a bad idea to get a new mba and I am wondering if anyone has ever compared these two in terms of performance. I always run several applications plus windows with VM, I don't really want to get anything underpowered than my current mbp.

So, my question is if I get 2.13Ghz/256G SDD/4G RAM MBA, would it run faster (or at least not under perform) compared to my current machine? I would really appreciate your thoughts.

 

[Hellhammer]

Your usage doesn't require much CPU power so C2D is fine. The biggest downside is the RAM limit which is 4GB because running two OSs at the same time uses a lot RAM so you would benefit from 8GB.

The SSD will give a noticeable boost though so I would say the MBA will feel faster

 

[miata]

I'm in the same boat as the OP. Except I carry my system a lot between meetings rather than commute. I'm convinced that the fully loaded 13" MBA will be an upgrade. I even dropped by the Apple Store and played with a 2 MB 128 GB unit that was plenty snappy.