There's nothing "bad" about a Celeron chip.  Intel has positioned that chip
as an entry-level processor, but its performance is still extremely good.
I'm tempted to say that the production costs are higher for a PII than for a
Celeron, but I'm not actually sure that is the case.  The most significant
difference between a PII and a Celeron is that the level 2 cache on a PII is
four times larger than that of a Celeron, so at a given clock speed a PII
will outperform a Celeron on CPU intensive operations.  Also, the Celeron
uses a 66MHz bus and the PII may use a 100MHz bus...although I'm not sure
about the PII 333.

Here's an example: I work in R&D at a networking company.  We just produced
an "all in one" Internet server that does all the usual stuff: email, web
serving, file serving, proxy, firewall, etc...and it runs on a Celeron 333.
Even with 50 users, the system uses only a fraction of the processor's
bandwidth.

Depending upon the use that you intend for your notebook, you may find that
the Celeron is a good choice.  In fact, unless your are performing torturous
graphical or numerical operations, you probably won't be able to tell the
difference in performance between a Celeron 400 and a PII 333.

So, my opinion on the Celeron vs. PII pricing structure is that it's just a
matter of marketing.

If your system was one of the first PII's to be produced it's unlikely that
a P3 will be a plug-in replacement.  But since Dell uses industry-standard
ATX motherboards, you're probably in luck...you can simply replace the
motherboard with an aftermarket board.  And since a good quality motherboard
is around US$100-125 (mailorder), it's a pretty economical upgrade.

Drew Dunn

-----Original Message-----

Hello ladies and gents,

I was just searching the dell web page and I noticed "at least" in the
notebooks,  that a pentium 2 333 is one hundred dollars more then a celeron
400 mhz.  Could anyone tell me what is so bad about the celeron chip.  And
why the p2 is so much more?

One more question I would like to ask is I have a Dell Desktop which is a p2
333 and I was wondering about upgrading it.  Can i put a P3 say 600 or
whatever p3 chip into a p2 chipset or do I have to replace the mother board.
I also heard about 100 mhz bus and I believe that came out before I
purchased my computer and I was wondering if first of all I can change or
replace that and second of all is it worth it.

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