Building up a New Computer fr my Kids to use

It's my understanding the Pentium would be more robust of a processor as opposed to the Celeron. The front side bus is quicker, so if you got a decent video card, it should do the trick

Just my $0.02

Dude, when I was young I still had the 486 DX2 when Pentium III was coming out. Reading this thread makes me want to stab my father all over again (The man with the work-issued laptop and the shiny new P3 at home that he never used). Perhaps your children will feel the same?

Actually, the processor speeds are negligible when you consider the gains of the Pentium.

I think for the kids, so long as you up the RAM to a Gig, and get a decent video card, like an ATI with 128 Meg on the card, should make it a great system for your kids.

Just lock your door at night, just to make sure.......

Frankly, it's going to be mostly a moot point. Back when the computers were new one was squeezing a little more juice out than the other, but the speed difference is going to be marginal at best, especially since they will both be dogs running current applications.

I'd probably stick with the Pentium. But like I said, the difference is going to be very small.

The Pentium is going to address data a little faster than the Celeron. IIRC, it also takes up less power.
Throwing anything more than 512mb of ram in a P3 system would be a bottleneck, so would anything other than a low-end current, or medium range old card. (9200-9600 Radeons, 5200 - 5900 nVidia (Or a Ti/Mx))
Anything else is a bottleneck.

binary visions said:

...especially since they will both be dogs running current applications.

Click to expand...

And your children will hate you.

Do your kids already have a PS2 or Xbox? For what kids would do most I think a game system would be a lot more fun and a lot less hassle than an old computer like you're looking at.

On the other hand if your kids already have a game console and you just want something they can use to learn to type, surf the net, send email, etc. either system would be fine, I'd lock down everything so they can't download all the backgrounds, screensavers, cursors and whatnot that are full of viruses and spyware that will bring an already slow system to a halt. Otherwise a 1ghz system is still pretty capable for anything but games, image processing, CAD or video editing.

I've got a gforce4 ti 4200 128mb I'll sell you for $5.00 plus shipping, IIRC Geforce cards were faster than Radeon cards back when 1.0ghz was considered fast.

Kornphlake said:

Do your kids already have a PS2 or Xbox? For what kids would do most I think a game system would be a lot more fun and a lot less hassle than an old computer like you're looking at.

On the other hand if your kids already have a game console and you just want something they can use to learn to type, surf the net, send email, etc. either system would be fine, I'd lock down everything so they can't download all the backgrounds, screensavers, cursors and whatnot that are full of viruses and spyware that will bring an already slow system to a halt. Otherwise a 1ghz system is still pretty capable for anything but games, image processing, CAD or video editing.

I've got a gforce4 ti 4200 128mb I'll sell you for $5.00 plus shipping, IIRC Geforce cards were faster than Radeon cards back when 1.0ghz was considered fast.

Click to expand...

That was a bit of a rocketship card in the day, IIRC.

Yeah, I put it in a system I built 4 years ago, even then it was spanking a lot of the low end Radeon and GeForce FX cards. Supposedly the 64mb card was faster than the 128mb I have and the real hardcore guys stepped up to the Ti 4600. I've kind of gotten out of the whole computer thing over the last few years, it seems like this card's major drawback and what eventually forced it out of the market even for budget systems was along the lines of DirectX 9.0 there was something the card couldn't do that DX9.0 needed. When I bought the card I had the philosophy that I could buy the very best technology from last year at discount prices and keep up with technology for a while without spending a ton of money, turns out that video card was pretty good and pretty cheap when I played games like Quake or NFS Hot Pursuit, but it really couldn't keep up with the new games at all.