Celerons & Pentiums & AMDs, Oh My!!

[THL]

I went in to Circuit City tonight and was talking to Mr Computer Man. I had a list of the laptops that I had seen on their website that I wanted a "hands on" view of. I walked in wanting to see 6 of them, and walked out with 3 completely different PCs in mind.

What happened was that I saw an Acer with a 17" screen. *sigh*. I wish I had not seen those monitors, I was perfectly happy with my 15.4".

I am now down to that Acer (80GB HD Celeron 512mb memory 17" screen), a different Acer (120GB HD Pentium 1GB mem 15.4" screen) or an HP (80GB AMD 512mb also w/ a 17" monitor). I don't really need so much memory as the 15" Acer, and after seeing the 17" monitors, I may be hooked on them. They also have an SD drive and that would make downloading pictures soooo much easier.

So now what is the thought? I had a really bad experience with Acer about 7 years ago and that makes me weary of them now, but I am also not sold on an AMD (not even really sure why I am not).

[ZFBoxcar]

I had a Celeron for a couple years and very much regretted the experience. Every program took forever to load, same with starting up the computer, and it crashed a lot. I replaced it with a Pentium 4 which was WAYYYYY better in every way. And then it died. And now I have an iBook. Macs are the best

[Jay]

AMD is as good as Intel for your everyday work and gaming. And yeah, unless you dont download movies from the internet, you dont need a 120Gig HDD.

[bonehead]

I went in to Circuit City tonight and was talking to Mr Computer Man. I had a list of the laptops that I had seen on their website that I wanted a "hands on" view of. I walked in wanting to see 6 of them, and walked out with 3 completely different PCs in mind.

What happened was that I saw an Acer with a 17" screen. *sigh*. I wish I had not seen those monitors, I was perfectly happy with my 15.4".

I am now down to that Acer (80GB HD Celeron 512mb memory 17" screen), a different Acer (120GB HD Pentium 1GB mem 15.4" screen) or an HP (80GB AMD 512mb also w/ a 17" monitor). I don't really need so much memory as the 15" Acer, and after seeing the 17" monitors, I may be hooked on them. They also have an SD drive and that would make downloading pictures soooo much easier.

So now what is the thought? I had a really bad experience with Acer about 7 years ago and that makes me weary of them now, but I am also not sold on an AMD (not even really sure why I am not).

If possible, cast your eyes on a fujitsu screen of around 17".

[gunnut]

The best laptop processor is a Pentium M. It is completely different than Pentium 4 Mobile and vastly superior. Pentium 4 is probably the worst processor Intel came up with.

Celeron is a Pentium with lower clock speed, lower bus speed, and lower L2 Cache memory. There is a Celeron M as well, which is based on the Pentium M, with all the above "castrations" plus a few of the power saving features disabled.

Pemtium M is actually based on Pentium 3, with some unique (and salvagable) features from Pentium 4. This processor is designed from ground up to be a laptop processor. Previous laptops use lower powered desktop processors to conserve energy for laptop requirements. This one has advanced power saving features designed into the chip to extend battery life. It generates virtually no heat when idle, unlike the Pentium 4, which is a space heater with a fancy screen.

Pentium M is sometimes mistakenly called "Centrino" due to Intel's marketing campaign. The long story is that Intel came up with the Pentium 4 with extremely high clock speed as a way to sell more chips. The problem was the inefficiency of the design. P4 pretty much needed 50% higher clock speed and nearly twice the power to complete the same task that the competing AMD (the original Athlon at the time) processors could do. This huge energy consumption is OK for a desktop, but unacceptable for a laptop. So Intel's Israel design team came up with the Pentium M to fill the need in the laptop market. Now Intel is faced with a big problem. How do they sell the Pentium M, which was running at 1.4 GHz at the time, along with the Pentium 4 running at 2+ GHz? Intel's marketing machine came up with a solution. It won't sell the processor alone. It will sell it as part of a technology "package" called Centrino. You get a nice Centrino sticker if you have a laptop with a Pentium M processor along with Intel's mobile chipset and wireless solution.

There's the brief history of Intel's current processors. It sounds confusing. But I can assure you that it is not close to what AMD has to offer.

I will make the short story long if someone really wants to know. Otherwise I'll save the bandwidth and not bore you to death.

[bonehead]

The M series pentium is also easier on the batteries than the other intel chips.