I am considering purchasing a new laptop to upgrade from my existing 1.13-GHz Pentium III. Is there a big performance difference between the 1.13-GHz Pentium III and Centrino 1.5 Ghz? I know the battery life is going to be better, but I am more concerned with perfomance on applications like VMWare or Video Editing.

Thanks,

Eric

Centrino was developed orginally to go against Transmeta Crusoe CPU's. They are designed for Wireless networking and good battery life. They are not specifically designed for performance. If you want performance, look at P4-m Chips, optimized for laptops (hense the M, which stands for mobile), they come up to 2.4ghz I believe. Avoid getting a laptop with a desktop processor.

The CPUs in a "Centrino" are P4 processors and they have the 1MB Cache. Definitely will be better than a PIII. Also they will perform at full speed on battery where a standard P4M laptop on battery loses around half of it's processing power to save battery.

<<<The CPUs in a "Centrino" are P4 processors and they have the 1MB Cache.>>>

Where did you get that from!?!? that is very wrong - a Pentium-M (the CPU of a Centrino setup), is a complete redesign from the P4 "Northwood", hence it is code-named "Banias".

The Pentium-M runs at speeds up to 1.7GHz, and because it does more Instructions per clock than a P4(-m), it will perform more or less like a P4 2.6/2.7GHz. It has 1MB of L1 cache, as stated above, which is selectively switched on or off depending on it's usage. It has revised and improved power-saving technology.

<<<will perform at full speed on battery where a standard P4M laptop on battery loses around half of it's processing power to save battery>>>

It can run at Full speed on battery (AS CAN THE P4-m), for example the Pentium-M 1.6GHz can speedstep to anyone of these speeds(600MHz;800MHz;1000MHz;1200MHz;1400MHz;1600MHz), but as soon as it is not used, the CPU will switch to ultra-low voltage Deeper Sleep to save battery life even further.

The Pentium 4-m on the other hand, can only speedstep from its full speed to, its reduced speed (1.2GHz), but it can do this selectively and instantly (even on battery).

Bear in mind, that for your Pentium-M notebook to be a "centrino", it must use the P-M processor, the Intel Pentium-M chipset, and the INTEL Wireless card.

RaPTuRe

Who's General Failure and why's he reading my disk?