Opinions on laptops with Celeron cpu's. Are they too slow?

A mate of mine wants to buy a new laptop and has asked me for my opinion on an Asus A6R laptop. One thing I noticed is that it has a 1.6 ghz Celeron cpu.

Just wondering what peoples opinions are on laptops with Celerons compared to P4s. Ive always found them to be a lot slower than the equivalent P4, or was that just in the old days of Celeron 300's? Should I steer him away from the Celeron.

Another model he mentioned is the Asus ASA6011U which has an AMD Sempron 3100 and seems comparable to the A6R at around the same price.

I have a Amd Sempron laptop with 128 mg ddr memory. It is very
SLOWWWWWW. I know I need more ram probably 1 gig. I noticed
the more you load programs it is generally slowing down more
(more programs running in background) I would go with what ever is the highest you can stand $$$$$$ wise you will be ok. I can watch movies
but to access anything you can count on waiting a couple of minutes.

My laptop is a Sempron 2800+ (1.6GHz) with 512M, which think is what makes it fine for what I use it for. The stock 256M would have cramped it more.

Current Celerons aren't as far behind P4s as with earlier chips, some of which were badly crippled. Suitability depends on application - you wouldn't choose the Celeron for a gamer or power user, but web, multimedia and office applications should be fine.

He would only be using it for net surfing, office apps etc anyway. What about Asus are they a good laptop brand in general?

Not sure if its any help to you but i have been using Acer Turions lately and have had good sucesss. All have come with 1 gig of ram. That seems to be a good number for these.

P4 laptop = heavy/high battery use/bulky
Celeron = underpowered cpu other than for regular email checking and browsing.
Pentium M = Perfect balance of speed/weight/battery use

(Turions are AMD's answer to Pentium M's, so your choice really)

Celeron is a poor mans chip to start with as is the new Sempron, hate it as well. In a laptop you want as much bang for the buck as you can afford as it is so miniaturized. My rule of thumb is to have at least 50% more resources available in a laptop over a desktop. Ram and big hard drives are your best friend.

Chris P.

:)