Complete care for Inspiron question

Celeron Ms have 1-2 the cache (or maybe less) and fewer power saving features over PM. If you don't care that much about battery life and can tolerate the performance hit, they may not be a bad deal.

I bought my wife a 2.4G Celeron D with 512 M shared memory. It was only 10% slower than my 2.4G P4 (512K cache) with 1G memory and a separate graphics card when running one of my regression tests (14 minute CPU intensive task). I was surprised it did so well considering the price ($250 for the entire machine with OS). She does not need any more than processing power and is quite happy with it.

I have an old mobile P3 (600M) laptop that is still quite useable. I would expect a 1.4G Celeron M should be more than 2X as fast.

Many people seem to be preoccupied with getting the "best" technology. I think it is more important to get the best price for the technology you need and can use. Some only need very little processing power and can be satisfied with a modest machine. Gamers, engineers, etc, can use all the power they can get their hands on. I wouldn't recommend the same machine for both groups.

Peter