I used to always think that Celerons were lousy. Certainly not as good as Pentiums or AMD's. And, maybe that's true. But, I have and old Dell Dimension XPS T500. That's a groanin' 500 mhz. Way too slow for this day and age. But, I couldn't afford a new computer, so I decided to upgrade. But my ol' BX motherboard wouldn't upgrade very far. I found, through posting to the Dell user forum (which, btw, has some really great and knowledgable posters) a site called www.powerleap.com

Powerleap was able to boost my Mobo to a maximum of 1.2ghz using the Powerleap processor. It was cheap and it was effective. It's what I'm using today. It ain't fancy, and it ain't fast, and it's frustrating sometimes, but I have a Celeron. And, I'm moderately happy, given the restriction of only 1.2ghz. I also have 512 mb RAM.

I guess my point is, if you got the bucks, go with a P4 or AMD. If you're strapped for cash, the Celeron's latest chips will do you fine. After all, think about what you will need to be processing. For instance, at work I need power for the GIS mapping graphics I do. At home, I'm mostly using the standard browser, email, etc. I get along just fine with Photoshop, and of course Object Desktop stuff. Of course, if your a gamer, all bets are off. You do best with the latest, greatest, at least for video cards. But, what do I know?

< begin, the little celeron that could...

i went from a celeron to an athlon, but the jump was too big (400mhz celeron to 1.53athlon xp) to accurately compare the two. but i'll tell you my little HP pavilion celeron was a WORKHORSE. this was a computer i got in '98, that i ended up maxing out (GO 256mg ram!!), dual video, dvd player - and for a while it just took anything i threw at it. till photoshop 7, anyway.

i later bought a Toshiba laptop with a celeron.. when i took that to work and started using it everyday with graphics and video editing, it started to crap out real fast. for the same price a year later, i bought an HP laptop with a P4 that can serve as a mobile desktop computer.

but here's what experience has taught me:


celerons are best suited for buisness apps.. ms office, web pages, basically anything hallowed out in the windows desktop enviroment. when you go into graphics, rendering, video - you need something with more of a punch (that bus speed and caching comes into play) or else you have to take the load off of it with a powerful graphics processor (shared memory baaaaad) and a lot of ram. even sound needs to have hardware support. at 2.5ghz i can see where someone's celeron will prop them up, but for that money i agree with what someone else said - go AMD. HP makes solid athlon machines for good coin.

that HP pavilion of mine is still in operation and runs great, i gave it to a friend with a TV wonder card so he can watch cable on it. it does his papers but once he tries doing his geographical surveys on it.. heheh it just chokes.

eMachines = baaaaaad.

/end topic

i was downstairs chatting with one of our IT guys the other day, and i noticed he had a new eMachine on his workbench. it had a big sticker on it that said "this computer is never obsolete! for 99$ a year you can blah blah blah".. i said thats interesting.. 'never obsolete'.. the IT guy said "that thing was obsolete before it went on the shelf"