I know this question is a simple one for the computer literate. But I was just given a laptop with a Celeron processor
I know the Celeron is inferior to the Pentium, but exactly how?
My computer use is:
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Word Processing
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Internet
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Games
S
Both are manufactured by Intel. The Celeron is essentially a slightly stripped down version of the pentium: Article on the differences between a Pentium and a Celeron on How Stuff Works.
SImple explantion, as I am not an IS guy.
Pentium’s have better on-chip (correct term?) cache. That is, the chip can store info on itself rather than having to retrieve it from memory (I am totally simplifying). This results in faster peformance. From what I understand, the newer Celeron chips have somewhat addressed this problem and aren’t really that much worse than a similar Pentium. Now, some IS guru will come along and give you the real SD.
FWIW, the computer I’m posting this on is a nearly 4 year old Celeron 500 with 95 MB of RAM and a crappy factory video card that dxdiag says has 6.5 MB of memory (I’m assuming it’s a 8 MB card). I have never had a problem running anything on it, except GTA3 which is slow and choppy. I have run some pretty resource intensive games on it (Black&White, Hitman 1&2, Civ 3) without problem (a few had to have graphics at a bit lower res, but they worked fine). I would say for your uses, a new Celeron should be fine.
Just as a question, anyone know what the most demanding game or piece of software out there right now is?
jk1245’s explanation is spot on.
Intel has traditionally sold “stripped down” versions of its flagship processors to the low end of the PC market. A few years ago, they started the Celeron brand to label their stripped-down Pentium II.
These first Celerons (233-300 MHz) peformed horribly, because they lacked any sort of Level 2 (L2) cache[sup]1[/sup].
Intel quickly learned from their mistakes, and added 128kB of full-speed L2 cache to second generation Celeron (300A - 500 MHz). These performed within about 20-25% of the performance of the the Pentium IIs of the time (512kB of half-speed L2).
Later generations of the chip added the SSE instruction set from the Pentium 3, bumped the bus speed to 133MHz and L2 cache to 256kB, and lastly, transitioned to the Pentium 4 architecture.
My laptop is a 4th generation Mobile Celeron, running at 1.2GHz with a 133 MHz bus and a 256kB L2 cache. It feels about as fast as a 1.1 or 1.2 GHz Pentium 3, which has 512 kB of L2 cache.
You’re not going to notice much of a difference between a Celeron and Pentium running at the same clock speed, at least not more than the difference between two similar processors of adjacent clock speed steps (e.g., 1.2 and 1.4 GHz P3).
Word processing and web browsing are pretty CPU non-intensive tasks, and you’ll be fine with anything above about 500 MHz. Games are a different matter, but they also depend heavily on the graphics hardware you have. I can encode an MP3 file, for example, in about the same amount of time on my desktop and laptop, but I see about four times the gaming performance on my desktop, which has a Geforce 3 card, as on my laptop, which has integrated video.
jk1245, I haven’t been in the PC gaming scene much lately, but Doom 3 should be coming out later this year, and supposedly it doesn’t like anything less than a Geforce 4! If you’re asking about non-gaming, any type of video editing is going to be resource intensive, especially if you’re talking about MPEG-4 compression.
[sup]1[/sup]There’s a great overview of CPU caching at arstechnica.com.
cache takes up much silicon space so is expensive, celeron saves money on this.
but another thing it saves is power. all that extra silicon in the cache will draw extra power, that is why celeron is a popular choice for laptops where power is a problem both because of battery life and cooling difficulty without much room for airflow.
Can I change the question a little? Would it possible to upgrade the celeron chip in a computer? I have a light, easy to use laptop that I rarely use because the original celeron chip is cranky. It would be great to upgrade this laptop and use it for real life instead of just travel.
To “furnishesq” regarding the OP :
If you’ve been “given” a Celeron laptop, don’t look it in the mouth. 
In other words, you’ll probably be happy with it until somebody gives you something better. You probably will see a performance difference in “Games”, before you become dissatisfled with your WP or Internet apps!
well J.C you probably can. First you’d need to tell us what kind of Chip/generation is in the machine, the model number of the laptop etc. You can buy mobile chips for laptops(although they are ridiculously expensive.) YMMV putting in a faster chip increases heat in the machine. THe laptop might just not be designed for such a task.
Www.pricewatch.com says you can get a p2 celeron 400 mobile for 73, a p2 celeron 750 for 67 and a p4 celeron 1.5 for 77.5.
Prices aint exactly standard for these ultra-low(by end user) demand chips.
oh, and just additionally, to furnishq. You can probably upgrade your laptop to a full pentium chip. However again YMMV since upgrading increases heat and might in turn destroy your new laptop.
in my opinion it is not wise to attempt to get performance out of a laptop. laptop is just not meant for performance, you need to build a new desktop pc.
even if its not a celeron, i believe mobile processors are not the same as the regular ones. i mean if my athlon was installed into a laptop - the laptop would catch on fire with secons and then you have the same story for the hard disk etc …
i meant “within seconds”
with stock AMD cooler the heatsink was almost too hot to touch, and an average laptop maybe gets 10% of that airflow.
Web browsing and word processing don’t need anythinng that powerful. My current box is 400mhz and I can surf the web, listen to mp3s, do WP, etc all at once without a hitch. To play any modern games it wouldn’t work but for everything else its works fine.
In reality it’s only games, heavy graphic design, and video/sound work that needs the real fast procs