I have been offered a choice of 2 2nd laptops nice and cheap from a family friend. The laptops in question are a Compaq Evo 610c and 620c. I have checked the specs on the Compaq/HP website and the primary difference between the two is the processor. The n610c comes with a Pentium 4-M processor and the n620c with a Pentium M. I don't know the speed of the processors, but am I right in thinking that the Pentium M is the superior of the two? Thanks in advance for any advice given.
The Pentium M is derived from Pentium 3 technology, and is very efficient in terms of work per clock cycle and in terms of battery life. I believe Core2Duo came evolved from this. The Pentium 4-M is based on Pentium 4 Net Burst architecture, one distinct feature being it has a very long execution pipeline. This basically means that whilst it operates at a high clock speed - for applications where it can't predict what will happen next (the branch prediction fails) the performance can be hampered significantly compared to equivalently clocked competitor architectures. The P4s were always very good for encoding MP3s and the like (the process can be effectively architectually parallelized), but not so good for gaming or for SuperPi where they required monstrous overclocks to approach the performance of modestly clocked competing architectures. They also consume more power than the Pentium M, IIRC so battery life won't be as good.
Thanks for the info. I'm only after it for basic stuff and portability, so it looks like the Pentium M is the one to go for. Cheers.