In spite of having tried all of the guidances recommended as a cure for my present machines freeze -up tendency it appears that I’m going to have to replace it.
Looking into the specifications for the three leading home computer systems I find that they all seem to have the same components and properties.
SO-------while not trying to start a donnybrook among the faithful,I must ask for advice as to the following:
1 Since all ot the specs read about the same, is there REALY any significant difference in the top three advertised machines?
2 If ,as I suspect, there IS no appreciable difference,is price the best guideline?
3 What is the performance difference between Pentium and Celeron?
Since most,almost all, of my activity is now limited to internet-----how about some recommendations?
Before this gets bounced over to IMHO, have a look at the makers’ stats for problems and customer service.
PC World recently did a survey on this in their December issue, and HP/Compaq was dead last. I found it funny that HP was slightly better regarded than Compaq, since they’re just different brands from the same company.
Gateway’s fourth-worst, and Dell is fifth-best, all out of 19 makers. EMachines was the best, which really amazed me. Not long ago, EMachines was known for wretched little computers that were dead on arrival about 75% of the time.
If you’re just using the PC for web browsing and email, anything that boots up Windows XP will do fine. Celeron, Pentium and AMD processors are all OK for that. It’s when you get into high-performance gaming and video editing where you need to start paying close attention to the details.
If they have very similar components and performace numbers you just need to switch over to:
Support quality like gotpasswords said.
How well the case appeals to you as well as the keyboard amd mouse provided. You can also look at the expansion opportunity of the computer based on the case and the slots on the motherboard. Many people don’t care about that however.
Also, as gotpasswords said, any of the processors will work fine if you mainly use your computer for internet appliactions. Any of them can almost always process faster than the connection can receive it.
In case you want to know:
Celeron is generally the slowest processor of the bunch. It is not desirable for CPU heavy application like graphics manipulaton or maximum performance on the newest games.
Pentium IV’s and Athlons are a hard call. The new Athlon 64’s outperform Pentium IV’s on a lot of tasks but the non-64 bit versions of Athlon’s can generally be considered roughly equal to Pentiums when they are matched up correctly.
Note that Celeron processors are basically cripplied Pentium 4’s; they have less L2 cache (Very fast memory built right into the processor) and a slower Front Side Bus (FSB, basically how fast the processor can talk to the rest of the computer.) The Celeron line basically allows Intel to use otherwise functional processors that just have part of them not working, so that part gets shut off.
Also note there are two varietys of Celerons floating around - the regular Celerons, which are these days based off the Northwood core P4 chips, and have 128kb of L2 cache & a 400mhz FSB, and the Celeron D’s, based off the newer Prescott core P4’s, that have 256kb of L2 and a 533mhz FSB. The regular Celerons are very poor performers; usually a 1.6ghz Duron (AMD’s old budget processor) could beat a 2.6ghz Celeron in most tasks. The Celeron D’s are much better, and can actually hold there own against most of AMD’s new budget chips, the Sempron line - more on that later.
Right now, there are also two types of Pentium 4s avaible - the Pentium 4 C, (which is the Northwood core) and the Pentium 4 E (which is the Precott core). In a reverse of the Celeron situation, at the same clock speeds, the Northwood core processors are usually slightly faster than the newer Prescotts, and run cooler as well. Though Northwood cores are getting harder to find these days.
Right now there are three types of AMD processors that are commonly avaible. The first is the venerable Athlon XP line; these are good chips for their price, and generally their model number matches up fairly well to the Pentium 4 chips, though at the higher end (2800+ 3000+ & 3200+) the model numbers are bit overly optimistic.
The second type of AMD processor is the Sempron, budget chips that are all (except for the 3100+ model) renamed AthlonXP chips, with the model numbers fiddled with to compare to Celeron processors. For example, the Sempron 2800+ is actually a renamed AthlonXP 2400+. Generally the AthlonXP 2400 matches up quite well against the 2.4ghz Pentium 4, and the Sempron 2800+ is supposed to match up against the 2.8ghz Celeron D. Note that the Sempron 3100+ is the odd chip out; it is actually an Athlon 64 chip without the 64 bit stuff & half the L2 cache. It is still a very good performer, and beats every Celeron & matches 2.8ghz-3.0ghz Pentium 4 in many tasks.
Finally, there are the Athlon 64 processors; they tend to trail a bit behind Pentium 4’s in media encoding, but are VERY fast in gaming; the Athlon 64 2800+ will match a 3.2-3.4ghz Pentium4 in most games; the Athlon 64 3500+ will beat out the 3.8ghz Pentium 4 in gaming as well.
Yes, but it depends significantly on what you’re planning to do on the machine. When you buy a bargain-basement machine just for email and internet" but then you see this really software, game, video editor, etc. and it just won’t run well because you got what you paid for. You then realize you’re stuck with a substandard machine for the next few years and either gut it out or start slapping upgrades on it to squeeze out enough performance to run Office 2006.
The moral… buy the best all-purpose machine that you can afford.
Price is a good guideline but there’s a term you need to know which is “benchmark.” That is basically a test that tells you how the machine runs under certain circumstances.
On the high end, it’s pretty significant, especially when there’s a lot of number-crunching involved. Just keep in mind that the low end is constantly getting higher, so you’re probably hurting yourself by buying a crap processor.
Are you sure you’ll never run any other software, or have kids/grandkids visit who want to run games, or want to sell this to someone you know?
Think about these things before you buy. I can’t tell you how many friends and family members I have had to disappoint after they bought a bargain basement machine, and then 6 months later they were unable to run “just this one” piece of neat specialty software they’d found. They want me to tell them how to make it faster. All I can say is “go back in time and follow my advice about buying a computer with room to grow.”
Get a white box. That way you can specify exactly what components you want in it. One of the problems with the big-name systems is that they may have the same advertised specs, but different components (even within the same model line). Plus you won’t have to deal with the extraneous crap software that the big manufacturers tend to dump on their systems.