I can vouch for eMachines, even though they have the reputation of being the Wranglers to Dell’s Levis. I’ve had one of their P3 500’s for 3 years with zero problems. As long as you have no computer snobs to make fun of you, they’re a great deal. Although I noticed eMachines seems to be going with only Celerons and AMD’s now, neither of which appeal to me personally. Full Pentium or nothing!
It’s a lot like getting a new car. If you don’t care about bells and whistles and money is tight, you can get a used car, or a new Kia, but it will be practically worthless in a few years. Or you could bite the bullet and make the investment in a state-of-the-art model, which would be double the price but also double the shelf life. I guess it depends on how “urgent” the situation is.
Whatever you do, since you said you’re a novice, don’t overclock or use Regedit to hack the registry. (Reminds me of the time on this board about a year ago when another admitted novice had trouble running Myst 3 and some l33t d00d told her to install Linux :rolleyes:) Both of those should only be done by people with a lot of “tinkering” experience, and it’s still asking for trouble.
I don’t know if Sims Online is 3D, but if it is, you could get a low-end geForce 4 video card (about $99) for noticeable, possibly dramatic improvement. That would be my advice, especially if you know someone who can put their newer video card in your computer to see if it makes a difference.
don’t get a geforce 4 its power is worthless with your cpu . instead get a geforce 3, geforce mx400, or alternatley a tnt2 videocard. all these crads are practically being given away nowadays for as little as $39 bucks get one of those slap it in. lower the video settings to about 800 x 600 and you should be playing it without any choppiness. i can’t imagine sims being as graphically challenging to a comp. as say unreal tournament. before you do any of this try running it anyway it just might work
They can both be sockets. I believe the Celerons around the 366 MHz range were in that odd transition phase where Intel was phasing out the slots in favor of the sockets and were producing CPUs in both flavors. At any rate, the 400 MHz in my old comp was a socket.
And could you clarify the “CPU she has” vs. the Celeron as she is using a Celeron? I don’t know what may have changed between different speeds of Celeron, but they both use a 100 MHz FSB and are both sockets - are there other differences to consider?
You guys have brought up my next question…
I was searching online to see the difference between Celeron and Pentium. Some good article talked about Celeron being way inferior to Pentium at first, but they improve their L2 cache (or actually now have cache) and at this pointthis guy was saying Celeron and Pentium processors were almost the same, Celeron being way cheaper…
I called and talked to a guy at Dell, and he was bashing the Celeron and was pushing me into the newest Pentium 4.
What do you guys think?
Celerons are slower. No doubt about that. The actual difference between the chips has changed over the years, so your best bet is to find some real-life performance numbers and then see if the difference in performance is worth the increased cost.
I’m not sure I understand what your are asking. What i tryed to say is that the celeron she has is based on the P2 chip, while faster celerons (apx 1 ghz) are based on the P3 or P4. So they are different chips and would most likely require differnt motherboards.
The celeron she has was a P2 with the internal cache deactivated. There is no internal cache in these celerons. They were either deactivated to set a lower priced product or were P2’s with a defective internal cache.
Later celerons came with some internal cache which shows a great deal of improvement.
If you are not into that much gaming a latter celeron should do you fine (if you just really want to play the sims)
