On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 4:55 PM, Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> wrote: > >> > You know, I don't exactly agree with that. The D600 (and D610) are still relatively useful laptops that, with the right desktop environment, can perform quite well, especially with the 2.0GHz Pentium M and 2GB of RAM >> Ummm, no. I had a D610 and now have an already-aging D630 with a Core >> 2 Duo. There's a big difference, and of course the D630 can run >> VMware with 64-bit guests. > > I have benchmarked a Dell Inspiron 640m with a 2.0GHz Core2Duo with 2GB of RAM against a Dell Latitude D610 with a 2.0GHz Pentium M with 2GB of RAM, using the same performing hard drive (as the D610 uses PATA, and the 640m uses SATA, I had to settle for 'same performance' and not 'identical drives') with the exact same OS (I literally cloned the 100GB drive in the D610 to a 100GB in the 640m and ran the same image) and found minimal performance differences in terms of responsiveness in normal use, doing one thing at a time. It's only when doing multiple things, or doing multithreaded things, that the Core2Duo pulls away. OK, but who just runs a single process? And 2GB RAM is kind of minimal - I like lots of disk buffer. If you don't have things in cache, your 'responsiveness in normal use' is going to be dominated by disk waits. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com