Looking for advice on my first DS laptop buy!

Hey A Modern Myth. Welcome to the forums. As far as your questions go, here are some answers:

1) The i7 has a much larger cache and two extra cores.

2) The thermal paste will depend on your own usage. If you are using it for web browsing or Powerpoints, or MS Word, you can stick with the lower one. If you are programming, plan to have many (20+) windows open at once, are editing video, or are doing any other labor intensive thing, you should probably upgrade the thermal paste. Judging from your needs, I would probably advise the upgrade, although I have never had the opportunity to measure the thermals side by side of two xm15's, one with and one without. If you wanted to save a little cash, a laptop cooling pad would probably be more effective, and it would probably cost about $25 for a decent one.
As far as the Bigfoot card goes, your card will probably never be you bottleneck, so the upgrade doesn't matter much. I really like mine, but looking back, I don't think that it was worth the upgrade cost. I would advise the thermal paste if you were going to choose one, but I don't think that you should expect to see any dramatic improvement from either.

3)The 1920x1080 will make it look much better. Also, as far as graphics performance goes, the 630M will not get you much, no matter what resolution you have, although it will be slower on the 1920x1080 I don't know what the exact statistics for those games are, but I have gotten better performance on some with the integrated graphics, so if you are looking for gaming power, you should be looking at at least an x15 (preferably, if you could swing the money, the level 2).

Edited by Orange7 - 15 Jul 2012 at 7:25am

You're welcome, and congratulations on the laptop.

Along the lines of the video card upgrade, however, I do not believe that DS can upgrade that card, and its placement is very inconvenient within the chassis.