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What's faster: 1.2ghz Ibook 14" or Inspiron 1000 Dell laptop (whatever that is)
- Thread starter California
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Yeah, I kinda thought it was going to be faster - - I think somewhere on this site someone said that a good rule is to double the CPU speed on Mac and you get a real feel for the actual way the machine works. Doubling a 1.2ghz gives me a 2.4 Pentium and I think the Inspiron has a 2.2 Pentium chip? Can't recall.
Rest assured the iBook will be faster than a 2.2ghz Pentium especially if the pentium we are talking about is a celeron,
If you really want a good speed increase put 1gb RAM in the iBook and you will have a very handy little machine....
ShadoW
If you really want a good speed increase put 1gb RAM in the iBook and you will have a very handy little machine....
ShadoW
Remember also that out of the box, XP has something like 35 unnecessary background processes running, that eat up CPU and RAM. The disk indexing service is particularly bad.
An example of how these can slow down your machine: I'm a Java programmer, and I do a lot of compiling on my PC laptop. Using the default configuration with virus checker on, my 1.6 GHz Pentium-M was something like 30% faster than my colleague's almost three year old 1GHz PowerBook at compiling the same project (not only do I have a faster CPU, I have a faster HD and 1.5GB RAM vs 1GB RAM, and javac is faster on x86 than on PPC). After removing the unnecessary services (especially disk indexing - compiling involves lots of disk access), and turning off the on-access virus checker, my PC is 2x faster at compiling. (Edit: we just rechecked, it's closer to 2.5x faster)
As for Word, Office 2000 worked fast enough on my previous 350MHz PIII laptop with 256MB RAM, but it was running Windows 2000, not XP.
But anyway, for a fair comparison, you need to give the specs of the Inspiron. Download Belarc Advisor and run it. It'll tell you all you need to know about the PC.
Edit:
A 1.6GHz Pentium-M is roughly equivalent to a 2.4GHz P4.
A 3GHz Celeron is roughly equivalent to a 2GHz P4 (although, I don't think there are any 3GHz Celerons)
An example of how these can slow down your machine: I'm a Java programmer, and I do a lot of compiling on my PC laptop. Using the default configuration with virus checker on, my 1.6 GHz Pentium-M was something like 30% faster than my colleague's almost three year old 1GHz PowerBook at compiling the same project (not only do I have a faster CPU, I have a faster HD and 1.5GB RAM vs 1GB RAM, and javac is faster on x86 than on PPC). After removing the unnecessary services (especially disk indexing - compiling involves lots of disk access), and turning off the on-access virus checker, my PC is 2x faster at compiling. (Edit: we just rechecked, it's closer to 2.5x faster)
As for Word, Office 2000 worked fast enough on my previous 350MHz PIII laptop with 256MB RAM, but it was running Windows 2000, not XP.
But anyway, for a fair comparison, you need to give the specs of the Inspiron. Download Belarc Advisor and run it. It'll tell you all you need to know about the PC.
Edit:
A 1.6GHz Pentium-M is roughly equivalent to a 2.4GHz P4.
A 3GHz Celeron is roughly equivalent to a 2GHz P4 (although, I don't think there are any 3GHz Celerons)
It predominantly comes down to the fact that the Mac is a minority and many websites are set up specifically for Windows and Internet Explorer 6.0 but there are other more convoluted reasons.
IE is quite a bit faster with IIS servers because it cheats. The browser doesn't send the full "handshake" when accessing a site, but IIS servers recognize this and don't go "hunh?" like non-Microsoft servers do. So response is faster.Reckless said:
And like someone else said, different browsers render differently - IE /seems/ faster because the way the page is displayed makes it /seem/ faster. But Firefox can be made to be as fast or faster as IE (if not actually to seem faster than IE) by some tweaks to the configuration.
mad jew said:The difference between the two for Office and browsing is going to be negligible, maybe not even really noticeable. A faster hard drive will speed things up but you probably don't really need it - they are very expensive. There are other gains that you will get from an iBook over a Dell due entirely to OSX but unfortunately the only two major aspects where OSX is slower than Windows is in Office and browsing but I can't emphasise enough that the difference really is tiny.
Hell, with a bit of a placebo effect, you may even think the iBook is faster.
ive used macs all my life and know that windows is faster when browsing the internet. if hes use to the windows web experience he might get frustrated with the mac. for some reason macs hang. and this is with any browser...except for when safari first came out. for sme reason its slowed down now days. but in general the mac does seem to process web pages slower...i think this has something to do with DNS look up or something like that.
California said:
That's sort of true, but not the whole story. A "Pentium chip" means absolutely nothing. A Pentium 4 or M, on the other hand, means a lot. As I recall, you can add roughly a third of the GHz of a G4 to compare to a Pentium 4.
things are greatly effected by bus cache and weather it's a G4 or G4e, it's rather complex flame wars have been fought over it for eons it's fast enough for anything your going to do dont worry about it, i'm posting this from a 600MHz G3 which i pretty much depend on to run my whole life.
Yeah, Hector I agree with you. Well I love macs, and at moment, I own nine of them -- two ibooks, four Tibooks from 400 to 1 ghz, one iMac G3, etc.. But let me tell you my only anti Mac secret: I was in love with my old 145b Powerbook bought new in 1994 that ran 7.5 I believe. In LOVE. Loved its keyboard, sturdiness, "large" hd 120mbs! and I had upped the ram to 8mb from stock four I think. it was my Word processing machine that got me through school and I was working on all my projects on it. Using Word 5.0 for Mac.
Well, the "lifetime"Kingston ram that I'd put on the machine conked out. And the year was now 2001. Kingston couldn't "find" replacement ram for me to use. I was on the internet at the time on a webtv machine that ran pretty good and kept my work life on the computer away from the internet, if you know what I mean. The only solution Kingston had for me was that they would give me a free stick of ram for a new powerbook. So the Apple tech at University offered me a free 128mb stick of ram for a new Tibook. *that was worth like 100 bucks back then.
So here I go from a 145b Powerbook with NO ram and NO hd and dinky Word and I buy new Word for Mac, get on the new g4 powerbook (i had skipped like four generations of powerbooks in the seven years I held on to my old machine) and I expect the g4 TO FLY on Word.
Nope.
Even the G4 TItanium at 256mg 400mhz was just about as mopey and same speed as the 145b Powerbook. From 1993-94 era.
I called Apple, panicky at the 2400 dollars I had just laid out for a big new machine and tried to figure out the problem.
Everything that has been stated here in this current post is just about what they said at that time. No one really cares to make Macs run fast on Word. I don't get it. I bet if I fired up that old Pb it would seem plenty fast. I hear the author Dean Koontz got wise to this upgrading thing a long time ago and that he writes all his novels on a 1993 LCII machine with ancient Word because he likes it and doesn't want to affect his creative flow.
Kinda admire that.
But the point of my last post is that I know not to expect total miracles where Word and internet surfing are concerned; however -- I wanted to know if there is any difference between a pc laptop and a Mac one, as i have been on Macs since 1989.
Well, the "lifetime"Kingston ram that I'd put on the machine conked out. And the year was now 2001. Kingston couldn't "find" replacement ram for me to use. I was on the internet at the time on a webtv machine that ran pretty good and kept my work life on the computer away from the internet, if you know what I mean. The only solution Kingston had for me was that they would give me a free stick of ram for a new powerbook. So the Apple tech at University offered me a free 128mb stick of ram for a new Tibook. *that was worth like 100 bucks back then.
So here I go from a 145b Powerbook with NO ram and NO hd and dinky Word and I buy new Word for Mac, get on the new g4 powerbook (i had skipped like four generations of powerbooks in the seven years I held on to my old machine) and I expect the g4 TO FLY on Word.
Nope.
Even the G4 TItanium at 256mg 400mhz was just about as mopey and same speed as the 145b Powerbook. From 1993-94 era.
I called Apple, panicky at the 2400 dollars I had just laid out for a big new machine and tried to figure out the problem.
Everything that has been stated here in this current post is just about what they said at that time. No one really cares to make Macs run fast on Word. I don't get it. I bet if I fired up that old Pb it would seem plenty fast. I hear the author Dean Koontz got wise to this upgrading thing a long time ago and that he writes all his novels on a 1993 LCII machine with ancient Word because he likes it and doesn't want to affect his creative flow.
Kinda admire that.
But the point of my last post is that I know not to expect total miracles where Word and internet surfing are concerned; however -- I wanted to know if there is any difference between a pc laptop and a Mac one, as i have been on Macs since 1989.
dude...3ghz will smoke that web page loading like you have no idea...omg and email...forget about it.California said:
Ok, this is a review of the Inspiron 1000 - http://reviews.cnet.com/Dell_Inspiron_1000/4505-3121_7-30904533.html?tag=tab
So why do you want to know which is faster?
Even CNET, which never gives Dells less than 8/10, gave this 6.3 - read the user comments too, it gets 5.3/10 user rating.
It's an old Dell (review was May 2004), with a Celeron 2GHz (equivalent to about 1.3GHz P4 or about 1GHz G4), 15" screen with 1024x768 resolution, 1.6 inches thick, 6 1/2 pounds, battery life of 2 hours 20 minutes, max RAM 512MB, 40GB HD.
So why do you want to know which is faster?
personally i dont get peoples bitching about word, 2004 runs fine on my 600MHz ibook g3, when ichat jumps it'll lag for a second but i rarely watch what i'm typeing as i use it at school when i'm looking at the teacher, excel however is a dog, i just use the appleworks spreadsheet.
plinden said:
Thanks for this informative reply, Plinden. The 1.2ghz iBook will be replacing this (what looks like) piece o crap Dell that belongs to my biz partner. I just wanted the iBook to have some speed bump over the Dell, it certainly will have looks and style over it, though we've had to watch dvds on the Dell and it performed pretty well. I just want it to be a happy gift that feels like a trade up, not trade down.
One final thing -- does any one know if the Dell screen is the same size as the 14" iBook or is it larger?