I am succumbing and buying a new laptop. It's hard to get a NON-TECHNICAL* answer to the following, so if you can help, that would be great.

I am a victim of marketing - Pentiums must be great, right?

Well, Question One
1) What is the difference between Pentium, Celeron, etc.? Are they really all pretty much the same?

2) I currently have a Pentium 4 with 2.4 GHz. If I get a Celeron with 1.5 GHz, will I notice a difference? Really?

3) What's FSB? And what do the different speeds mean?

I guess, really, what would be helpful:

- Pros and cons of different MAKES of processors;

- What each additional speed increment really means...

- Other things to consider ("FSB"? RAM?)

Not using it for gaming, so that's not an issue. Here's what I use it for:
- Email
- Office (Word, Excel, some Access and some PowerPoint)
- Web surfing
- Occasionally downloading missed episodes of "24" and watching them in WMP

I currently have WinXP with a P4, 2.4 GHz, and 256 MB of RAM.


* In other words, an answer like "Well, with 1.5 GHz you can microdrop 2.6 terraflops of etruscan snoods per binary parsec, but if you bump up to 1.6, your sonic cavities will be able to handle ether retrobit settings of picardian T-Bits at 6.25 flosses of received timing, depending on how you re-task your demand assigned multiple access accounts. Only a loser would make the wrong call on THAT." is not really helpful.Basically, here's the just of it..

1) Celeron's run slower than Pentiums. Usually, a 1.5 Ghz Pentium IV is twice as fast as a 1.5 Ghz Celeron.

2) Stick with the Penitum 4. It's probably twice as good as the Celeron.

3) I'll try to make this non-technical. Each CPU/Motherboard has a Front Side Bus and Multiplier. Basically, a Front Side Bus connects the CPU with the main memory (RAM). The faster the FSB, the faster the computer, because all components run faster. The multiplier (you probably guessed it) multiplies the FSB by a number (usually from 1 - 12) The result is your clock speed.

If you have a Penitum 4 at 2.4 GHz, you may have a FSB of 400 Mhz, and a multiplier of 6.

RAM is a different story. Depending on what you use your comptuer for, the amount of RAM varies. From what you wrote down below, 256 RAM is ample for what you are doing. If you ever do any SERIOUS video editing or photo editing consider upgrading to 512 RAM, or even a 1024 RAM. RAM comes in different speeds. Most new computers have DDR Ram, while older have SD Ram. As you probably can figure out logically, DDR is faster than SD.

So, in short, if you were thinking of buying a 1.5 GHz laptop, and you have a 2.4 GHz haprop, scrap that idea. You'll just lose you money, and will have a terrible computer. Of course, if the other compnonets in the Celeron are better than in the Pentium 4, post up the exact stats, and I'll fill you on.

JackoWith processors, everbody is going to have their own favorites. But regarding to the speed of a NORMAL single processor, clock speeds matter. Without getting too technical, the clock speeds are measured by how many bits it can process per second. Each clock cycle of the processor will push out one bit (1 or 0). Now if it is a 2.4GHz processor then it would be able to perform 2.4 billion clock cycles per second. So the more of those ones and zeros it can push out per second would make the processor faster and therefore better. With newer processors that have HT technology, they use something called HYPER THREADING. Hyper threading is a technology that puts more than one bit on each clock cycle. So a 1.6GHz processor with HT technology could actually be faster than a 2.4GHz chip w/out HT technology because it is processing more bits per second. With RAM I have noticed that the more the better. Random Access Memory (RAM) is the memory used to store temporary things like open applications. RAM is also referred to as system resources. When you end a program like Internet Explorer the RAM that was being used to store that program will become available for another program to use it. One thing to remeber is that there are a lot of your programs that run when you start up your computer and they will hog your RAM and cause your system to respond slowly. If you want to see what programs are running when your computer starts up, go to RUN on the start menu and type in msconfig and then go to the startup tab. Some programs are supposed to be there but other might not need to run at startup. Front Side Bus (FSB) is the term used to describe the processors data bus. This bus carries all information that passes from the CPU to other devices within the system such as RAM, PCI expansion cards, hard disks, etc. Higher speed (MHz) FSB would be better, creating  faster access to your devices connected to your motherboard.  Hope I could help with your questions and sorry I don't know much about all the different brands of processors, just stick with what you find works best for you.
So if I put those replies together, the question becomes... Does a Celeron have "hyperthread" technology... So a 1.6 Celeron would be faster than a P4?

How about a Pentium M? Is THAT faster than a Pentium 4, everything else being equal?

Thanks!Arrgh! First of all, Celeron's do not have hyper-threading technolgy. Pentium 4 does.

Put it this way -

Celeron sucks.

Pentium rocks.rjbinney.....Perhaps googling your questions would give you a much better idea .  Then you make the decision.

If you stopped 10 people on the street and asked them what they thought was say the best car to buy .......you would probably get 10 differant suggestions........The same thing applies to computers...

It's all about what you want ........

Cheers

dl65  

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Perhaps googling your questions would give you a much better idea .

........hello world i will pay you a visit....