Pentium M Processor?

well, the celeron sucks, so anything* is better. 

i have a pentium 4, not m in mine, and it's heavy as hell but runs fast. 
i have a friend with a pentium m,  and it runs slooooow  in mul*funbags*aking, but that thing also only has 512 MB of RAM, and i dont think he ever defrags his HD.


that said, if you need it, and it's all you can afford, get it.
that also said, if you don't need it TODAY,  I would wait, because DELL should have a new line out soon, INTEL is going to increase their production on newer sets soon, and prices should fall a bit.
finally, IF* price is that big a deal, you might consider shopping dell outlet... -  I would never buy a refurb laptop, but I would consider one that's a cancelled order.   it's very hit and miss, stuff usually disappears within an hour of posting it, but the deals ARE there...

burzoom , dystopia- thanks for the input. 

My current laptop is an old 750mhz pIII, so anything but a celeron will be considerably faster.  I'm not a graphics designer or anything so I dont plan on having adobe photoshop and macromedia, and big programs open at the same time, and I probably wont even run any games off it.  the most "multitasking" i'll be doing is tab surfing between gh, fgi and microsoft word. 

I also have a 3 year old 2.5ghz P4 in my desktop, so I'm curious how much slower the M processor is than a P4.  If I multitask editing software on the desktop, it starts running slow also, so as long as the M is just as fast as the P4 or at least significantly faster than a celeron I'm ok. 

I'll probably keep a closer eye out on slickdeals from now on in case there are any deals.  I got that desktop through a slickdeals ad for $450 a while back.   

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_M

The Wikipedia says that a 1.6 GHz Pentium M is approximately equivalent to a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4. 

The "M" stands for mobile, and it's a low-power (but not low-performance) chip.  Celeron is a low-cost (and low-performance) chip.  Pentium 4 uses more power, and wasn't designed for laptops (not that it won't work, but the chip uses more power and gets hotter than the M version).


If you're seriously only going to use the machine for web surfing and reading/writing Word docs, you probably don't care as much about the processor.  If those Word docs are big and/or you're reading tons of web pages or watching a few YouTube videos at once, I'd go for a little higher RAM over a few MHz in processor speed.