Which processor would perform better? I have a budget for a new/used laptop and I'm considering the IBM Thinkpad A31 P4 1.6GHz or a new Toshiba 2.8GHz celery.
Neither. Forget about those two notebooks and look for one using a Pentium M or Celeron M CPU. The Pentium M will have 1 or 2MB cache depending on the core. The Celeron M will have 512k cache, but is actually quite a strong CPU, arguably the "best" Celeron made. You can find these notebooks new starting easily under $1000 (that's after tax/shipping even).
Just break off the pin that defaults it to a 100MHz fsb. If the notebook supports a 133MHz (533MHz) fsb cpu then you have a 2133MHz P4. I haven't seen a desktop 1.6A that wouldn't hit 2.13GHz at stock voltage yet. Not to mention you could always use the wire trick to get a slight voltage increase if needed.
My daughter is running a mobile Celeron (256k L2 cache) 1.6@2133MHz on her Inspiron 5100 at the stock voltage of 1.2v.
The mobile Celerons aren't nearly as slow as there desktop counterparts because of the 256 K cache. The 2.8s are Northwood cores and should only be about 400 Mhz slower than P4s. The 2.8 will be much faster than the 1.6.
btw, I use a Celery 2.4 notebook and let me tell you, the real bottleneck will be the 4200 RPM hard drive and the amount of RAM. Get at least 512 MB for anything but the mildest usage.
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