On Monday, December 05, 2011 06:02:27 PM Les Mikesell wrote: > On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 4:55 PM, Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> wrote: >> It's only when doing multiple things, or doing multithreaded things, that the >> Core2Duo pulls away. > OK, but who just runs a single process? For the purposes of usability, effectively anyone who spends the day in Firefox. And there are a lot of people for whom that is the case. > And 2GB RAM is kind of > minimal - I like lots of disk buffer. What you like is irrelevant to the usefulness of 2GB of RAM to other people. > If you don't have things in > cache, your 'responsiveness in normal use' is going to be dominated by > disk waits. None of which negates the gist of the message, that a 2.0GHz Pentium M (and even a slower one) is still a usable machine. Nothing more; nothing less.