I will be looking at potential laptop for a work colleague soon. It's the usual balance of price, portability, power and battery life. We do plan to go Linux on it!

Anyway, an i3 is what we will gun for if it is realistically affordable but we have to see.

Failing that...

How much more powerful is the Pentium compared to a Celeron? Video playback is a major requirement of this laptop to be. Is there much difference in this area? My Celeron 877 hands video fine but, frankly, so does my Atom n455. An AMD e1-1200 was awful but it was running a hooky copy of Windows 7 so I am not sure how that holds.

Any info gratefully received.

Many thanks.

Unfortunately one has to be rather more specific than Pentium v Celeron, as there are multiple models and speeds. There are so many things to consider with video playback other than the CPU as well, and then you mentioned your other constraints. I would suggest you decide on a budget, shop around to see what is currently available and either try some out or post the models you have narrowed it down to and I'm sure we'll help you decide.

Ha! Thanks for the thought but that's a non-starter in Indonesia. You don't decide on a model, you decide on a spec, go to the local mall and haggle for what is there.

In theory you can order online. There is also a 50% chance you send your payment and the seller vanishes.

Alas, there is still enough corruption in Indonesia that you go to a mall, haggle a price, pick whatever is available there, see the machine RUNNING (to ensure you are not sold scrap) and take it home that day. The only good thing is that sellers are used to demoing their tech and dealing with paranoid customers.

i refused to by my celeron netbook from display and had to travel to the other side of Surabaya to get the exact model I wanted. So, alas, I am constrained.

The budget is not bad - up to $500 for the hardware - assuming the teacher goes with Linux and she wants portability first, speed secod. Video playback is an issue as I say but I have to spend more time with her to pin things down. Alas, this is the start of the new academic year and working evenings and weekends is compulsory to get the work done.

Anyway, I need general info. Pinning down a range of machines is a no hoper. Even if we did narrow down a machine at the local mall - if we did not buy that day it could be gone the next time we arrive. Online selling is not yet safe in Indonesia. :-(

The Celeron (aka Celery) is basically a disabled / crippled version of a Pentium so that Intel could fill the market niche. I would definitely recommend Pentium over it. For a while one could hack some Celerons in order to activate the disabled bits and make it into a full Pentium.

Note that there are newer versions of Celerons that are Core-based and even Nehalem-based. They are also crippled.

Also see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celeron

I would recommend an i3 or i5 if you want performance. If you want low power, I recommend Atom. However, do check the Linux support on newer Atoms, as it may not be there.

Sorry to hear about your buying difficulties, at least you can try different ones out. I agree with H_TexMeX_H but you should know that Intel is re-using the Celeron tag for their new model of crippled i3/i5/i7 instead of crippled Pentiums. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celeron [Edit: oh I see you mentioned that Tex] Of course those are probably not available in your market yet.

I would recommend an i3

Iḿ amazed anyone is still selling pentiums. . .

Wikipedia is a good place for useless info, but pentium is just post '486, and is a poor '586 cpu. AMD's k6-2 or 3 kicked ass beside it. Pentium needs mmx, also there was pentium 2 from history. p-4 or even p-3 are different animals.

I suggest you visit the mall with a friend with a smartphone, and grab a look at the specs of whatever youŕe offered online.

The current Pentiums are pretty decent low-cost devices that are lower clocked and lower cache versions of the pre-Haswell (Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge) parts and have just about zero to do with 586/P-4 parts. See http://ark.intel.com/products/family...ocessor/mobile (and you are looking at, eg, the 2012/2013 released parts, and not, eg, 2002 released parts).

cf, http://ark.intel.com/compare/72060,42925 for a little more info on recent examples.

As far as Haswell is concerned, the only released parts, so far, are the upper end parts, and filling out the range probably doesn't take place until Q3/Q4, so, you won't be getting one of those unless you can either wait a while or stretch the budget. (Of course, I don't yet have info on what parts are to be released Q3/Q4, or more importantly, at what prices, so if you do decide to wait, you don't know what you are waiting for; they may, or may not, be good for what you want.)

Of course, this is right, but it may not be the most important thing. While currently a Pentium may comfortably outpace a Celeron (although, maybe not by all that much in the case of a 1000M), given the way that branding works, if you just say 'Pentiums are better than Celerons' you'll get tricked by someone selling you a five year old Pentium, which won't be. So, you certainly need more information than just the branding.

Thanks for the info.

Personally, I solve the speed issue the following way:

Use a single core Atom for everything.
Then everything else seems fast!

Avoid Windows.

Simple! :-)

As a note: Teachers are massive productivity users. They need to be able to produce for ten minute deadlines. Their major needs are SOFTWARE (which is why they need Linux but teachers are notoriously computer illiterate and it's a bit of a hard sell so it's good I have some interest) and then responsiveness.

But that does not automatically equal power. Teachers need range of software but not depth. So they need graphics but not photoshop. They need video editing but just for cutting up example videos, not non-linear stuff. They need wordprocessing and powerpoint like crazy but do not push them. We are always in a rush so nothing is down with depth. It is, "Produce something usable, move on."

So they/we do not need that much power but we do need responsiveness. I use a celeron 877 and it is sufficient for my tasks. But then, we also need portability. I got a netbook minus DVD just for weight and size. It was a smart move.

I put it to my teacher friend:

You can have speed/power
You can have portability
You can have great battery life

But you can't have all three.

She has opted for:

Portability first
Power second
Batter life third.

I will run benchmarks on any possible laptop. I have a stack of figures form various machines and I can detect the generation of the chip. I doubt I'll get foisted with a truly out of date chip! BU means going to the local High Tech mall and testing and haggling. They have a lot of stuff there and it's well priced but buyer beware!

Thanks for the info. I thought there was bog all difference between a Celeron and a Pentium. Seems there is more in it than I realised.

Impossible question really, there is 15 years+ of pentiums and 14 years of celerons...

But if you wanted to compare current 'ivy bridge' iX vs pentium vs celeron, this is the basic differnces. Desktop CPUs used in this comparison, the mobile CPUs are different.

i7- 4/6 cores, hyperthreading (makes 1 core appear to be 2) turboboost (increases the clock frequency on some cores when under partial load), 8MB or more L3 cache.
i5- 4 cores, no hyperthreading, turboboost, 6MB L3 cache (apart from the i5-3570T which is 3MB).
i3- 2 cores, hyperthreading, no turboboost, 3MB L3 cache.
Pentium- 2 cores, no hyperthreading, no turboboost, 3MB L3 cache.
Celeron- 2 cores, no hyperthreading, no turboboost, 2MB L3 cache.

Max clock speed drops the 'lower' you go. All numbers non-turboboost. i7 (4 core) get to 3.7Ghz, i5 to 3.4Ghz, i3 to 3.4Ghz, Pentium to 3.2Ghz, celeron to 2.7Ghz.

As far as CPU power goers, there isnt that much differecne ebtween the i3, pentium and celeron. A higher clock speed pentium can be faster than an i3 in some situations. The celeron wil always be slower due to smaller L3 cache and slower max MHz, but its not a huge difference.

Aside from the CPU differences, there is also differences in the intergrated onto the CPU intel video.

As far as video playback goes, 'intel HD' doesnt support 'intel clear video HD'. Intel HD 2000/3000 (sandy bridge) and HD 2500/4000 (ivy bridge) do support intel clear video HD.

Even without cler video HD all current iX, celeron and pentium CPUs should be able to decode and play pretty much any video just fine.

Why amazed? Intel spend a lot of money of PR on the 'Pentium' name. Some people who dont know anythign will still remember 'Pentium' and they may prefer to buy a pentium because of previous advertising.

Wikipedia is a great tool. Some people find the info useless.....even if that is the case you can still make great use of it. Eg-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Bri...rchitecture%29

A nice full list of all the ivy bridge CPUs, with links to the intel spec pages. It can be faster to use that wiki page for information than just trying to check the intel spec pages.

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Cascade, Iḿ amazed they are still calling things pentium, because it's a clear breach of the rules of hi-tech marketing. Everything is ¨newer, faster, so much better it makes it worth your while to throw out stuff a year old and buy this;¨ - That's hi-tech marketing.

Calling something 'pentium' harks back to technological antiques from the last millenium, which is hardly the brand image anyone wants.

Yes, and if you think about it, that's exactly why they are branded 'Pentium'.

Umm....you didnt think that one through, did you?

ATI (now AMD) 'Radeon'. 2000 - current.
nVidia 'Geforce'. 1999 - current.
AMD 'Athlon'. 1999 - current.
Seagate 'Barracuda'. 1996 - curent.
Hitachi 'Deskstar'. 1994 - current (though to be fair that name might actually die sometime soon).
Western Digital 'Caviar'. 1991 - current.
Creative 'Sound Blaster'. 1989 - current.

just another point:
Sometimes it makes more sense to have some extra RAM added instead of a more powerful processor.
Especially for laptops with the usually slower HDDs it can make a big difference if the HDD can relax once all data are in memory, saving battery and HDD IO.

More RAM, and zRAM too:

zRAM at DuckDuckGo
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=zRAM