Pentium M 1.8 GHz vs Core Duo 2500

[ricka01]

Hello,

I am having trouble finding performance comparisons between the Pentium M 1.8GHz and the Core Duo 2500. Do any of you know how much faster the Core Duo 2500 (T60) will be over the Pentium M 1.8GHz (T42). Assume 2 GB of RAM in each system, and that I use MS Office extensively, mostly with large spreadsheet models and Access data bases.


Thanks
Rick

[Mod edit: locked -- duplicate thread.]

[Redmumba]

As always, I'm not an expert, and I can't comment on the finer details, but...

You won't necessarily gain "speed" so much as you will the ability to multitask. Most programs don't take advantage of the Core 2's dual cores, but Windows will do some mediocre load balancing--so if you're running say, Word and Powerpoint simultaneously (and this is incredibly simplified, understand), then one processor would handle Word while the other handles Powerpoint.

So you won't gain much of a performance gain on a single application (as most modern, non-speciality applications are not dual core optimized), but you'll notice the change immensely with multiple applications open. I know when I started using my mother's Core 2 Dell laptop, handling multiple CPU-intensive applications was much smoother than my own Pentium-M.