Hiya!

I haven't been around so much lately because i just moved I' gonna be starting University this fall so i'm now in the us.

Anyways, i'm gonna be buyin a laptop in the next few days for all my work. I'm thinking about the IBM thinkpad series but i'm not 100% sure in anything.

I'd like info on what exactly the Centrino processors are and how they differ from P4's and any other.

Also, if any of you have any laptop they just think i should get give me some info 

Centrino/Pentium M most definately. P4's will eat your batteries for breakfast! The Centrino's are ment to be used in laptops, and have great power management abilities.

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Originally posted by Random Intarweb forum

Answer:

As a general rule, the Pentium M (which, along with the Intel 855/915 core logic and an Intel Wi-Fi adapter, comprises the Centrino chipset) offers the same performance as a Pentium 4 running 1.2 GHz faster. Therefore, a 2-GHz Pentium M offers about the same performance as a 3.2-GHz Pentium 4.


At the same time, the Pentium M draws so much less electricity than the Pentium 4 that Centrino-based laptops offer battery runtimes that are up to twice as long as those of P4-based systems. Centrino-based laptops need much smaller battery packs to power them, which makes them much more compact and lightweight that P4 notebooks. Beyond that, the Pentium M also generates very little heat, which means the fans on a Centrino laptop won't kick on very loud or very often, unlike the distracting fan noise that often comes from Pentium 4-based laptops.

Because of all these reasons, there are far more Pentium M-based laptops on the market now than there are Pentium 4-based models. Go with Pentium M.

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I just found out that the laptop is either a Pentium M or centrino.... so out of the two which one is better and how?

Get the Pentium M (aka Centrino) but avoid the Celeron M if you can as like the desktop part, it's nothing special.

Pentium M has 1MB or 2MB L2 Cache
Clock Speed 1.50 to 2.26 GHz

Celeron M has 512k or 1MB L2 Cache
Clock Speed 1.20 to 1.60 GHz

The large cache allows a significant reduction in memory data latency providing a big performance improvement.  So therefore the Pentium M (not the Pentium 4-M) will provide the better performance.

Why don't you just go all out and get an AMD processor for your laptop? Overall they're better.

A lot of laptops have intel in, I would prefer AMD but a pentium M processor is a very wise choice. They vary their speed depending on how heavy the taks you are doing are. So if you are word processing, the chip might run at 1.6ghz, but if you are playing games, it could go up to 2.5ghz. Well thats at least what my friend told me.

Pentium M max clock in a Laptop at present is 2.26GHz (as said by Intel).  Yes AMD Turion is a better CPU but not if you want longer battery life.  You'll also be hard pressed to get a IBM Thinkpad with a AMD Turion64 Processor.