how much does processor speed matter?

[dj_mars773 10+ year member]

CPU speed is part of it but u want to have a higher FSB 800Mhz is ok even the 1066Mhz FSB is good. the better of them all is 1333Mhz FSB can be over clocked to 1700Mhz very easy on air cooled systems. then u look into the L2 cache the bigger the MB is always better say a quad core with 6MB L2 cache is good but the 12MB is better thats 3 MB per core. the AMD chips have hyper transport is like a server cpu lighting fast. thats why u see on pc games the AMD cpu clock speed is lower than intel, the speed in which its able to communicate with the system. many ppl prefer the AMD cpu for this reason for gaming. i used to be a AMD fanboy but now love the calculation per sec i can get from Intel.

 

[Jmac 10+ year member]

Almost anything using the Centrino2 platform is excellent. Fast, great battery life, reliable, and runs very cool. They should start around $800 and up, depending on features.

Avoid Acer (including eMachines and Gateway). We've been having tons of problems with them. Almost any other brand is fine.

 

[SomeGuyDude 10+ year member]

Proc speed becomes mostly irrelevant for 90% of users. When the processor comes into play is when the computer has to do a lot of hard calculations, such as video rendering, audio compressing, playing games, that sort of thing. A faster process doesn't make the computer faster, it makes it able to calculate faster.

What will cause a speed boost is more memory and faster read/write time on the hard drive. The latter will make your computer faster at opening applications, moving/copying files and the like, the latter will keep it nice and snappy when you have things already open and loaded up.

 

[silenkiller 10+ year member]

Ok, so - I didn't read any of this thread at all really.

But, at minimum if the laptop has vista, for any use, you should have:

Something core2duo

3-4 gigs of ram

rest is pretty worthless unless ur gaming hard or doing gfx/editing/rendering, which, you shouldn't be doing on a laptop anyway.