All I want is an entry level basic-does-what-I-want-and-perhaps-dualboots-linux-with laptop and these are the ones I am considering buying. My budget is only about £600...

I need to know the difference between Celeron and Pentium M

So Laptop 1:

Intel Celeron M Processor 350
512MB DDR RAM
80GB Hard Disk
64MB Intel Integrated Graphics
Display - 15.4" WXGA+ Ultra-High Resolution TFT Screen (1200 x 800)

Laptop 2:

Made by HP
Processor - AMD® Sempron 3000+ Processor
512MB DDR RAM (2x 256MB)
40GB Hard Disk
128MB ATi Radeon Xpress IGP Graphics
DisplayDisplay - 15.4" Bright View (Glare X Type) WXGA TFT Screen (1280 x 800)


Laptop 3:

Made by ACER

Processor Intel Pentium M
Processor speed 1.6 (725) GHz
Storage 60 GB
RAM 512 Mb
Graphics card 64Mb ATIradeon 9700
Screen size 15.4" WXGAanti glare

I recently worked on an Acer Travel mate (centerino) and I was preety impressed with it. Acer seems to be a good comapny (better than what i used to think of it)

HP IMO is not good ..they only make good printers ..and thats about it . These are just impressions of the comany and their products ..i havent really looked up the said productas though.

Go with the Acer, You won't be happy with the first two. Don't get Celeron confused with Centrino (which is a term used for laptops that have built-in wireless capabilities and has the Intel Mobile Chip).

The first one is a celeron. Also made by Intel but it's the lower end of the CPU's that they market. The L2 cache (quite important for performance) is much lower than the Pentium ones. Avoid this one at all cost if you can.

The second one could be looked at as a Celeron also but from the AMD chipmaker's point of view. The AMD Athlon can be compared to the Intel's Pentium chip. The lower class chipset for AMD was previously called the Duron, but now it's replaced with the new name called Sempron. Same problem as the Celeron, it has a lower L2 cache which means lower performance.

The Acer laptop has the Intel Mobile Chip which should have twice the L2 cache as the regular Pentium chips (for desktops). If it doesn't cost too much, up the RAM to 1GB since it might be needed especially if you run XP and lots of applications.

So basically this is how you would look at the chips by Intel:

Celeron - the lower end chip (L2 cache ~ 256KB)
Pentium (desktop CPU) - middle (L2 cache ~ 512KB)
Pentium M - one of the newer chipsets that's great for laptops since they don't use up much battery power (L2 cache ~ 1024KB)

The Pentium M has L2 cache of 2MB the others don't actually say how much cache they have.

Thanks for all you help, I think I will buy the other one, which is only actually £600 which is a baragin in my opinion for the laptops in United Kingdom (grossly overpriced)

Of course laptop 3, thats the most obvious dude. Laptops make pretty good laptops, well IMO. Since all of them have 15.4" widescreen which is good so I'm ont going to go into that. The Sempron and Celeron is crap man. Sempron I believe is worse than Athlon XP-M I think. Well Pentium, thats a winner. It has a Radeon 9700 which is by far the best one out of those 3. The other two are integrated, which is BAD for games, okay for movies. Go for 3, you won't be sorry. Trust me.