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To: Jim McMannis who wrote (54404)4/24/1998 10:26:00 AM
From: gnuman  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 186894
 
Jim, HP8260 (PII266) $1199 at Computer City (Todays ad)
This sytem sold for $1699 two months ago. It was $1499 last week!
This was listed as the top selling PII through retail last month. Where does Celeron fit at HP?



To: Jim McMannis who wrote (54404)4/24/1998 8:54:00 PM
From: BelowTheCrowd  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 186894
 
Here's a bit of news, in case you didn't know it:

The best thing you can do to get rid of that hourglass is to get a machine with a FAST hard drive and lots of memory.

The fact is that most sub-$1200 machines sell with no L2 cache. That was true with the last generation (where all but one of our non-PII models got no L2 cache) and it will probably be true of the next generation, no matter what processor we build in.

It's obvious to me that a Celeron machine with no L2 cache and a slow HDD is going to be a relatively sluggish performer, and is useful mostly to a non-power user. So is a K6 machine with no L2 cache and a slow HDD.

Personally, I'll put up my home-built Pentium 200 system against most of the P-MMX, PII, and K6 systems which are available at retail today from virtually all the mainstream brands. It'll blow them away due to: 128MB RAM, two <9ms HDDs and a large (250MB) partition dedicated entirely to the Windows swap file. Yeah, the processor is a bit slower. Who cares if you're waiting on disk I/O?

Unfortunatley, I couldn't easily sell that machine at Circuit City or CompUSA. There are too many others which have better sounding specs for much less than the cost of my "expensive component" homebuilt. That's a unfortuantely a reality of the mainstream consumer market, and one which Intel understands a lot better than AMD.

mg



To: Jim McMannis who wrote (54404)4/24/1998 10:20:00 PM
From: Shahen Petrosian  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 186894
 
> The HP Celeron unit I got to play with seemed rather slow. Saw the hour glass way too much when opening programs etc..

Program startup is not a CPU intensive process. Slow disk I/O and lack of ram are more likely to be the culprits here.