Max Timchenko wrote:

> No. The web pages often include plugins (Shockwave, for example) that
> require a lot of CPU and graphics card power to render perfectly.
> Moreover, rendering DHTML, especially in Netscape, is taxing.
>
> An example. I've a 400-MHz Celeron at home and 200-MHz Pentium PRO at
> the university, and I render complex pages at least twice faster at
> home. Explorer deals with it significantly faster on both system, but
> the difference is noticeable too.

I'd like to add my $0.02:
The situation is not only depending on CPU and graphics power, but more important
is still connection speed if we are talking about modem dial-up connection. If
you have cable modem or other fast connection, please get a fast computer to
match the power-needs by large amount of data you've recieved from the net. For
modem connection, the difference if fairly small. My friend has a 450mhz
(overclocked) Celeron with G400 graphics, I have a P233 with 16M PCI graphics, we
both use modem, connected with same ISP at same speed, when we are on the net,
both computers perform similar.

I used to work on PIII-500 (running win98) with 56K modem (connected at 44K from
office), I didn't see much difference when compare with P-200/Pro computer
(running NT4 WS) from my sister's uni (connected via LAN, the NIC is 10mbps, the
outside connection unknown), the 500mhz computer for sure is a bit faster than
200mhz, but I can't tell which part made the difference, the connection speed,
the OS or the computer itself (remember, sometimes uni connection is shared by
100s of users, sometimes shared by 10s). I can exp the 200mhz perform faster than
500mhz when there are less users logon (at uni).

Jun Qian

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