I have these two systems laying around and plan to take one of them to my parent's house for when I spend some days of visit.

One of the systems has a Celeron 400 Mhz and the other has a PII 333 Mhz (mobo and ram are the same in both). I was expecting the clock difference in the Celeron would compensate the lower cache (don't know the specifics on each processor) but the PII "feels" a bit more responsive.

Anyone knows for a fact if that PII should really beat the Celeron even running 20% slower? Or is it just my imagination?

Thanks in advance.

The 'bus speed' on the mother board can make the difference.

Try googling .. celeron versus pentium II ..

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=Google+Search
.....

The amount of ram usually makes a bigger difference on the slower machines. Jumping from 256 to 512 (using a gui) makes a huge difference in responsiveness.

Hi,

What comes from googling is basically what I know, they should be pretty much the same, or even the Celeron could beat the PII depending on it´s generation (having L2 cache or not).

As of memory, I usually ran just a few apps at a time and WindowMaker, and honestly, when I "upgraded" from 128 to 256 I didn´t see a worthy improvement... These systems choke before memory becomes the issue. Actually, I think it is the graphics side that make it "feel" slower. I am trying to get some better cards to test, just for the sake of it.
In the meantime I wanted to see if someone had some similar experience with this.

Cheers.

The PII will be better (at the time the celerons were too bad). You can check at Toms H/w (if they have archives). Celerons improved during the P3 times Celeron Coppermine 1.2 GHz will be ~ P3 733MHz (for Linux Desktop Use)

The setup with more RAM will be better. The speed of the processor depends if they are going to play back video. If going to playback Flash video, it is best to have a dual core processor that is as fast as Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 or AMD Athlon64 X 4450. The reason for this is Flash does not get accelerated by video cards.

When using old setups, ATI Radeon 7000 and 8000 series could be used with out any lost of features using the open source X11 drivers. Probably you can go as far as X800 series. If you want to use nVidia cards, no less than a GeForce6. The following is some information if you want to go the ATI graphic route.

http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon


I suggest use SoftMaker Office instead of OpenOffice because it a lot lighter for a Pentium II and Celeron setup. It is also easier to use.