Are celerons really that bad

[Avg]

I picked up a HP pavilion with a celeron 1.8ghz and 256mb ram, and it is very slow, I mean I've used pentium III and a duron 800mhz that are faster then this, now I"ve tried everything from adware removal to defragmenting and nothing seems to effect it's performance or lack there of. Now I want to know this before I offer to upgrade it to a faster P4.

 

[Silmatharien]

Well the HPs aren't great computers to begin with. You'd be much better steering clear of Celerons (or so I hear).

 

[Avg]

But the duron I used was of a no name brand with crappy chipset, less ram, and it was sdram instead of ddr. I might just run a bench to check if it's where it's supposed to be.

 

[Daewood]

i built a budget compy for family that only wanted to spend about 300 for everything on the computer and it is a 1.8 celly and 256 ram and it is slower than my dual 667 p3 rig in just about everything and horrible at multitasking even worse than alot of amds

 

[samuraisam]

Steer clear of celerons.

They have long pipelines like the P4, but nothing to fill the pipelies with because of the tiny cache. You see, longer pipelines, the longer it takes to restart for an error. If you don't have a large cache to re-start with, then you're out of luck. With multi-tasking, windows jumbles the threads all up, making for a lot of errors, and, yet again, failing to keep up with the errors. That's why they're so terrible at multitasking.

AMD's don't need a lot of cache, because they have short pipelies, and it doesn't take so much to restart the calculation, or whatever it's doing.

-Sam

 

[larva]

Put a (totally) fresh windows on it. HP software builds are so crapped up when they are new the machines won't hardly operate. After you use one of their builds for a while, it gets that much worse. They put so many crap (and useless crap, at that) utilities into their windows builds there's nothing left to run programs with. Sure, 1.8 Celerons are no great shakes, but I'm sure a new windows will make the machine seem freakishly fast compared to its present state.

 

[Bios24]

I feel your pain. A friend of mine bought a dell with a 1.8ghz celeron and only 128mb of ram in it. I had a 900mhz Athlon that went faster than it in everything. We put in an additional 128mb of ram, and that helped a little, but it was just a doggy machine from the start.

 

[Avg]

Oh it's not mine, I would never get a boxed pc, it's one that I'm fixing, and it's the first one I had to fix that was higher then 1ghz and yet it felt slower then a lot of the systems i had to fix. I have noticed how much crap hp has on it, there is this bar going accross the top which I don't know what it is for and a couple of stuff in the task bar from hp. This pc is a complete mess after all it is used by kids 8 and younger, lots of games installed, but still I ran reg cleaners, adaware and fragmentation and nothing seems to speed it up, I just think how the owner bought this crappy pc while they currently pay for two cable connections ($100) and aol($24.99) monthly. But what I really wanted to know is if I put a P4 in it if it would help it or just be slowed down by mess the os is in?

 

[larva]

No, I already told you what the cure is. If you actually want to fix the machine, do it.

 

[Quailane]

We have an athlon xp 1700+ compaq and it has none of that trouble. The only way it seems slow is in games. HP and compaq are the same for all intents in purposes except I guess compaq doesn't stuff the computer with tons of useless crap. I can't remember though because it has tons of useless crap on it right now that bogs it down. I say upgrade to p4 and add another 256MB of ram. That, along with a fresh install of windows and good anti-spyware and virus utilities should make it about twice as good right there.

 

[freeagent]

yep, hps are actually not too bad, try a different copy of xp, without all the hp add in stuff. the performance will double.. at least.

 

[Avg]

Well I would reinstall windows but that's not I have been asked to do, and I just can't go and erase everything they have and reinstall windows and expect them to be happy, before you tell me to ask them, well they are on vacation, so I can't do that until they come back.

 

[larva]

Well, the timing is up to you, but the answer is that the machine will not run properly on that windows install; it's not a hardware issue. I've been through this before with HP machines of that era. 1.7, 1.8, and 2.0 Celeron HP Pavilions came with a software build so bad that wouldn't run out of the box.

 

[JCLW]

There were some Celeron incarnations that were amazing (the Tualatins for example), but most are crap.

 

[jenko]

Im with larva format and fresh install of windows 2000, but thats not possible for now is it.

 

[Avg]

Not anymore, I returned the pc yesterday, but I'll tell offer them to either do a fresh install if they want to.

 

[beau_zo_brehm]

Not anymore, I returned the pc yesterday, but I'll tell offer them to either do a fresh install if they want to.

.... did you also reccomend a different processor?

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

Well, the timing is up to you, but the answer is that the machine will not run properly on that windows install; it's not a hardware issue. I've been through this before with HP machines of that era. 1.7, 1.8, and 2.0 Celeron HP Pavilions came with a software build so bad that wouldn't run out of the box.

I agree partially. I seen problems with a HP Pavillion PC that has a Celeron 1.7 ghz processor and 128 MB of RAM.

The Windows XP Home Edition installation has lots of errors in the event log.

Many of them about a file not being found even when reinstalling Windows XP Home Edition.

Windows XP Home Edition on that PC also gave me a BSOD and rebooted while installing the camera drivers for my Creative PC Cam 300 camera.

Thus was unable to even use my camera with that HP Pavillion PC.

 

[Avg]

I haven't had a chance to talk to them yet since they are in Florida on vacation, but I will offer them if they want to get a new cpu and fresh install or just the fresh intall, I have to go back there anyway to set up a wireless network(more like installing a wireless nic and setting it up) so I'll offer it then.

 

[Zuzzz]

I suggest the new CPU. Even a 2.4C. If for nothing else the extra cache memory. Secondly. LOAD A CLEAN OEM version of XP. I cant tell you the number of people I have made VERY happy with their Celerons by doing a good clean install from a build that isnt loaded down with HP stuff. Otherwise they should get a few good years out of it easy.

Z