Pentium 4 2.6 Ghz vs. AMD Turion 64 X2 1.6 Ghz

What is better for a laptop? I have an old laptop (Acer Aspire 1603) which is kinda broken, so i'm still undecided whether to spend money on it to be fixed or to buy a new laptop (most probably Everex Stepnote XT5000T).

However the acer carries a Pentium 4 2.6 Ghz processor, while the Everex is 1.6... will it be slower?? The Acer has 512 Mb of RAM, but I could upgrade to 1GB, while the Everex has 1GB (upgradeable to 4 GB).
The graphic card is ATI Radeon something 64 MB in the Acer, and 256 MB Nvidia 7600 in the Everex.
I mostly do multitasking (mostly internet+pdf+word+excel, or powerpoint, or coreldraw, or Arcview), so maybe a 2.6 Ghz processor is better than a 1.6 one?

The most annoying thing with the Acer is the loudness (terrible...) and it gets very hot, and it has only 40 GB HD. But it has XP, and I'm very scared to shift to Vista (Everex has Vista).

 

Forget about the word pentium 4 and laptop in the same sentance... period.

 

The Everex is what you want the turion x2 even though its clock speed is slower will beat the P4 heck they aren't even in the same league! Don't worry about clock speed the Ghz race that the P4s ran are over now, the name of the game these days is efficiency which the P4s weren't.

The turion x2 is a dual core processor therefore it will make multitasking easier as you said you do alot of multitasking. The nvidia video card is also better than the old ATI card found in the acer. Everything about the Everex is superior to the acer you listed (I am guessing that acer is a few years old now).

Even if the Everex has vista it is still superior to the acer and if you are so worried about vista then get a OEM copy of XP and install on the Everex and you won't have to deal with vista...

 

A single core of the Turion is around the same in terms of power as the Pentium 4. As the Turion is dual core it will be just as quick yet also be able to run multiple programs with much more effectiveness than the P4.

 

ok thanks.

now another question: what's faster and most able of multitasking (I hope i have all the specs right), both actual;ly and potentially?

- AMD Turion 64 bit X2 1.6 Ghz L2 Cache 512KBx2 + 2 GB RAM DDR2 533 Mhz + SATA HD 100 GB 5400 (RAM expandable to 4 GB and slot for an additional HD available) + chipsets NVIDIA® C51D (Northbridge), NVIDIA® MCP51 (Southbridge)

or

- AMD Turion 64 bit X2 1.8 Ghz L2 Cache 512KBx2 + 1 GB RAM DDR2 667 Mhz + SATA HD 120 GB 5400 (RAM expandable to 2 GB) + chipset NVIDIA C51MV

 

additionally, the AMD uses a so called Hyper transport techonlogy while the Intel Core 2 Duo doesn't... I'm not sure what does it mean though.

 

Depends on what you'll be doing with the laptop.

Have you tried posting in the what notebook should i buy forum? I'm sure we can help find the right laptop for you there.

 

get the second one and put another gig of ram in it.

off the bat the first one may feel faster because it comes with 2gb of ram, but after you upgrade the ram in the 2nd one its clearly a better machine.

 

Ram is like $30 a gig now anyway, like vicious said go with the second.

 

HT are supposed to have higher memory as well as inter-core bandwidth(and may be CPU to north bridge as well). However, in real life usage, this doesn't translate into faster system comparing with core duo or core 2 duo. Intel's shared bus system can still cope with it.

There may be some very specific application that can see the benefit but that is a very niche one.

The only practical advantage as far as I know is it is supposed to use less power when the system is at idle as the memory can be clocked down.