I’m in the market for a new laptop (preferably something that costs less than a million dollars). I’ve seen some good deals online and in stores, but each and every one of them comes with a celeron processor. When I asked my tech-savvy friend about this, he acted as if I was a lunatic for even considering buying it. Apparently, if I buy a comp with a celeron processor, it will suffer some kind of terrible plague and die before I even get it out of the box.
My question to all of you wonderful people is this - How exaggerated is his reaction? All the others are well over $1,000 and my current laptop closes the Internet everytime I press the letter ‘d’.
- Are you sure you system is BROKEN and not just INFECTED?
B. If you don’t know the differences in processors, you will most likely not see the benefit in buying a faster/more expensive one.
- See #1.
It depends what you’re going to be using it for. The Celeron processor is Intel’s low-end CPU which is not as fast or powerful as the Pentium. It’s also a lot cheaper.
If you are into heavy gaming or other applications that use a lot of CPU/graphics power, the Celeron is probably not for you. If you use your computer mostly for word processing and surfing the internet you should have no problems.
For internet browsing & MS Office usage a Celeron is find. You would need Pentium power for Gaming and Graphic’s applications.
The original Celerons were death out the box but this has not been true in years and any Celeron from 2.4 Gigahertz up should handle most applications great.
512 Megs of Ram will do you more good than a jump up to 3.2 Gig Pentium.
If your laptop only has 256 MB and uses some for video, your machine will be slow regardless of the Processor. (This is a rough guide, of course all things are relative and have exceptions)
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- Are you sure you system is BROKEN and not just INFECTED?
When I took it to Comp USA 6 months ago, they said that it was probably a broken keyboard. It would be $300 to replace. Even then, however, that might not be the real problem, but they could try the keyboard first and go (and charge) from there. Seems like it overheats too (gets all wacky when it’s on too long). So, I’m very hesitant to spend a minimum of $300 on an old computer when I can’t be sure that will fix it.
Definitely not into gaming more than online roulette. I’m worried more about life expectancy, is there a difference among processors there?
All seem to come with a DVD player, will there be problems there? Not that I see myself using that DVD much, but it’s good to know ahead of time 
I should probably look for one with upgradable RAM then? They all seem to have only 256.
No. Life expectancy of Pentiums and Celerons are both much longer than the Life expectancy of the rest of the components and the Hard drive especially.
(Disclaimer: assuming you don’t overclock in which case you wouldn’t be asking these questions)
Don’t hate me, but could you break it down for the slow person in the room? Overclock = ?
Feel free to roll your eyes as often as you like
DVD will not be a problem. The upgradeable Ram is a good Idea.
Try it at 256, if it feels sluggish then bring it up to 512.
By upgradeable it should mean there is an open ram chip slot and not that you can throw out a pair of 128MB chips and replace them with a pair of 256MB chips. This is a trick Gateway & Micron use to pull all the time. 
To make a processor run faster than it was designed to run, which creates more heat than it can easily dissipate and shortens the life of the chip. Think of it as hotrodding your car engine, you will get more power, but it’s harder on the engine.
Some super Geek gamers will take their chips and motherboards and increase the speed the processor (CPU) runs beyond the Manufacturer’s recommendations. To accommodate this they also add a lot of extra cooling or the chip will burn up from excess heat.
Don’t worry I don’t roll my eyes on PC questions about hardware.
Keyboards are NOT $300. I just picked up a new apple keyboard for $30.00
If you wanted the cheapest possible, you could pay $20.
This assumes they really said keyboard and not something like ‘motherboard’ which IS more expensive.
In theory, it can also produce sporadic timing errors. You might never know that these errors occurred, and so it’s a crapshoot.
Quick processor-industry side note: for a while, it was my understanding that Celerons were Pentiums (Pentia?) that didn’t make it past quality-control at a certain level. For example, as a chip fabrication plant cranks out millions of Pentiums, a certain (slowly increasing) percentage of them will not pass QC at their rated speed. When the percentage gets too high, every chip after a certain serial number gets re-named “Celeron”, and the production run continues for another million or so units without running any of the chips through the more rigorous QC processes. A production line making 2GHz Pentiums might create a line of 1.75GHz Pentiums, for example. The details of this have changed several times since the last time I bought Intel (I’m an AMD zealot now*) but the concept remains valid, last I heard.
This reduces the total cost of the Celeron chip (good!) but introduces a negligible risk of failure (bad, sorta). It also means that a savvy user has a good chance of being able to get a 2GHz Pentium for the price of a 1.75GHz Celeron (good!) but also runs the risk of cooking their chip (bad!). And of course, there are unsavory vendors who will sell you a Pentium for cheap (good!) when it’s actually a Celeron (bad!).
So Celerons have a reputation for being “Grade B” processors.
[small]* AMD does the same thing, but you asked about Intel[/small]
integrated laptop Keyboards can and do cost $300 to replace including labor.
Look at the OP.
They definitely said keyboard. I don’t know much, but I know the difference between those two things 
I felt like that estimate was high, CompUSA isnt really the cheapest place. I assumed it included the installation, part, and about 200 bucks in, “I know you don’t know anything about this, so we’ll pad the estimate” charges.
Well, i don’t think that’s exactly true. I can quite easily envision someone walking into a computer store and saying “I don’t know anything about computers, but i want to buy one that will play the latest games.” That person probably wouldn’t be too happy if you sold him a Celeron.
Anyway, my wife has a Celeron laptop. Most of her work involves word processing, research, internet, and email. Her most frequently used programs are MS Word, Adobe Acrobat, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Endnote (a bibliographic program). She often has Word, Acrobat, and multiple Firefox tabs open at the same time, and for the most part her Celeron laptop works perfectly well.
It had 256Mb of RAM when she got it, and i added another 256 a bit later, which seemed to make it run a little better.
Depends on what you want to do with it. If raw speed is important to you I can recommend buying a laptop with an intel Pentium-M. I have one, and it’s pretty fast (feels about 1.5 x faster than my (newer!) celeron desktop witch runs at almost double the CPU frequency). So a “slow” Pentium-M machine can definitely be faster in real life than a “fast” celeron machine.
Also, for “office” type jobs (i.e. running a couple of applications at once, switching between them regularly) or photoshop your best investment is in getting as much RAM as possible (1 Gb recommended, and I wouldn’t use less than 512 Mb if you’re using windows XP). If your typically running combination of applications takes up more than your physical RAM, your computer will be slow whatever you do.
oof, my bad. If you were in any way mechanically inclined, I’d send ya to ebay. Laptop keyboards are about $80 over there and keyboard replacement ISN’T that hard to do.