I was out at Walmart the other day and they had some more Compaq S4020WM
packages in. They'd sold out for awhile. They're also selling a Compaq with
an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ processor priced several hundred dollars more, the
main difference being a LCD monitor. I don't care about the monitor myself.
Of course the XP2600+ is a little better & faster than the XP 2400+ if you
can afford it. The graphics is OK for my purposes, but I don't really care
much about graphics. You might want to put in a better graphics card,
depending on how it performs for you out of the box. How much is 1GB RAM? I
got two 512MB strips from
www.4allmemory.com for about $90 each. They're the
only one who sells memory for the S4020WM, at least they were a couple of
months ago when I got mine.
--
Euc1id
"Ricky Spartacus" wrote in message
om...
Ooops, just opened the box 10 seconds ago. Wasn`t familiar with the
term Celeron until now.
I work with graphics editing which program freezes very often and no
wonder the guy at Circuit City said, ``You don`t want the Celeron, you
want the Pentium.`` Asked him why, he says, the GHz don`t actually
represents the speed. Pentium is 10X faster than a Celeron with the
same GHz. Let`s get this straight. Either get a Pentium or a Centrino.
The S4020WM has the Athlon XP 2400+, and sold only at Wal-Mart? And
you put 1GB RAM in yours? How cheap is cheap for 1G?
--
I use primarily chess analysis software. It maxes out the processor (near
100% usage). There's just enough time left, provided by the op system
apparently, to insert a little multitasking such as go online with IE/OE,
or
run another app if it isn't too processor intensive. I run it that way
24/7/30/12, in other words almost all the time. Speed is everything to me.
Those who don't run time-intensive apps probably don't care, so almost
anything would work. Actually I could still get along with my old
Commodore
64 for most things, but the chess software requires optimum speed. Real
speed (#ops/second), not "fake GHz" numbers.
--
Euc1id
"Kevin Childers" wrote in message
...
It's really all a matter of what your apps demand from the processor.
Having some in low end servers I can say that when you have a lot of small
apps being called at random they seem to do well. If you are using a
heavy
app that places a big load on the processor that onboard cache really
becomes important. You lose a nanosecond here and a nanosecond there,
after
a bit those begin to add up and you can tell the difference.
KC
"Euc1id" wrote in message
nk.net...
You've got it reversed. The older Celerons based on the Pentium II were
excellent values, good performers for the money. The current batch based
on
the Pentium IV are junk. They juiced up the "GHz" artificially because
they
knew it had sales value, but that means it doesn't indicate the true
speed
anymore.
For example I briefly had one of those 2.5GHz Celeron computers, exactly
like Ricky Sparticus bought, and compared it to my old 500MHz Celeron
computer with W98se purchased in 1999. You would expect the new one to
be
5X
faster, based on the relative GHz valuses. Right? Wrong! It was only 2X
faster, using various operations from my own apps for benchmarks.
So I took it back and got this 2.0GHz AMD Athlon 2400+, which according
to
the relative GHz you would expect to be 4X faster than the old 500MHz
Celeron. Right? Right! It is indeed 4X faster!
So you can ignore the "GHz" altogether if you've got one of the new
Celeron
processors, because it's meaningless. It just doesn't have the indicated
ops/sec, which is the only thing that matters. You might be able to find
some obscure benchmarks that say differently, but certainly none of my
apps
did so.
Now, to further emphasize why GHz doesn't indicate the true or relative
speed anymore... Get ahold of one of those 1.3GHz Centrino processors
that
come in some notebooks, and they're a lot faster than my 2.0GHz Athlon
XP
2400+. Maybe 50% faster. So "GHz" is for the birds, it doesn't mean
anything
anymore.
So the 2.5 GHz Celeron is very sluggish by current standards. Take it
back
and get something worthwhile.
--
Euc1id