Which is better: a Pentium 4 1.60gHz or a Celeron 2.6gHz??

[TRocky]

Hi: I am assembling a computer from spare parts and I have a Pentium 4-1.6gHz and a Celeron 2.6ghz to choose from. It will be running in conjunction with 1gig of memory, (2) 120gig hard drives and probably a separate video card. The computer will be doing light bookeeping work with WinExcel and probably QuickBooks for our residential cleaning business. We'll probably add some scheduling software somewhere down the line before we will upgrade to a better machine.

I just want to get off my wife's old laptop before it dies. Does anyone have an opinion as to which CPU would be better in our situation:?

Thanks - TomR

[D.8080]

My personal opinion is 2.6 ghz celeron.

Have fun!

[gshv]

Do you have Pentium 4 Willamette (256 KB L2 cache) or Northwood (512 KB L2) processor? Both processors, especially Northwood one, could be faster than Celeron 2.6 GHz if you work with big files. Essentially, Pentium 4 1.6 GHz will be faster than the Celeron 2.6 if the applications read/write lot of data from/to memory, and slower when the processor needs to do lot of calculations with relatively small data set.

Gennadiy