Celeron VS P4 for surfing/email/etc
 

A friend of mine asked me to price a Dell for his family. I was looking at their low end machines and most of them have Celeron processors. I was wondering if a Celeron would be enough juice for a family computer that will probably only see some word processing, surfing, and e-mailing? They are trying to stay on a budget and jumping to a P4 computer adds quite a bit of money because you need to get out of the "cheapey" section.

yes it would
it is still intel.....
just not top of the line
celeron tend to run a little slower
than offically rated
more important would be
to spring for the extra RAM

My parents own a low-end Dell and it has no problem running World of Warcraft, so I don't see it having a problem with basic usage.

here is a good comparison of the 2

http://www.tomshardware.com/2002/09/...ling_brothers/

basically, for email, web searching, and low end stuff, a Celeron is great, gaming and other high end stuff, you want a Pentium, the extra cache makes a difference.

Ditto. For the normal family stuff, a Celeron is probably still overkill. Just don't expect to run 3D games on it, but if that's not a concern, don't spend the money.

This is the most important item (from alpha phi's haiku-like response :) )The 256 they ship with isn't enough by far. Do them a favor and buy an extra 256 stick yourself, Dell charges too much for it ($40 i think).

Also do the Dell dance, check for coupon codes and deals on places like www.techbargains.net . Check both home and small business sections of the dell website, they are different divisions and offer different pricing.

I have ordered this celeron:

A Toshiba Satellite Intel Celeron M 380 1.6GHz Laptop

http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/pro...20&catid=22495


My question is: how will this celeron operate MS Office applications such as MS Project, Visio as well as word and excel?

I also want to watch DVDs and perhaps play the odd game (doubtful).

it's okay. I bought the machine above.