Agency Tech Tips:
Celeron: Good Or Bad?
When it comes to buying or leasing a computer or computers for your agency, the plain truth is that, usually, you get what you pay for.
Even though computer prices have actually fallen over the years, consumers were delighted when Intel brought out its less expensive Celeron computers in the late 1980s. We were just happy to have more affordable PCs, and many of us didnt bother to question why the units were less expensive.
Intel is famous as a maker of central processing units (CPUs), which are the "processors" that control the operations of our computers. These processors are usually found on a single chip.
Celeron CPUs are different in that a part of the chip, known as the math co-processor, has been disabled, thus giving the Celeron the reputation of being a "crippled" chip.
This disablement means that Celeron chips run at somewhat slower speeds than the fully enabled chips. Newer versions of Celeron chips have added a cache (sort of a built-in memory bank in the CPU) that helps these computers run somewhat faster. In general, however, Celeron-based PCs will run slower than fully enabled Pentium models.
So what kind of PC is right for your office? Paying less for a Celeron unit makes sense if your computing needs are light, and if you anticipate they will not grow significantly.
On the other hand, if youre often running several software applications at the same time and you need all the processing power you can get, youre probably better off spending the extra dollars for a fully enabled model.
If your current computers seem sluggish when several applications are running, chances are a new computer should be a full-blown Pentium. This is especially true if youre using heavy number-crunching applications, such as some accounting software.
A good rule of thumb is that you can never have too much processing speed or too much RAM. As users, we tend to add new programs to our systems without even thinking about it, and we may not notice any immediate effect on performance. As this practice continues, however, system resources become stretched to the point that performance can suffer.
So, before you go running off to the computer store, or to a computer vendors Web site, take a careful inventory of your current computing needs, then try to anticipate what you may need over the next three years (the average useful life of a computer). Be generous in estimating your future needs, realizing that new software applications are requiring more and more from our systems.
An honest self-assessment should give you a good idea of what kind of computers will work best for your office.
Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, August 19, 2002. Copyright 2002 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.