I'll never get a celeron except in very special situations. Like the Pentium 3 "tualatin" celeron was essentially a full P3 with a 100mhz bus instead of a 133 mhz bus. The same with the old celeron 300A which was essentially a pentium 2 with a slower FSB, but which could be overclocked to just as fast as a regular pentium 2. But since then, Intel has made SURE the celeron is a cripple, both in FSB and other architectural areas.
The thing for me is that the price difference between a regular Pentium M or P4 cpu and a celeron just isn't that much. Maybe $100 tops for a non-bleeding edge speed processor. So if a celeron laptop is more than $100 cheaper than a laptop with a non-crippled cpu, they're saving money elsewhere. It could be in the case, the HD, the vid card, anywhere.
You get what you pay for, and a celeron is a budget part for people who really need to scrimp on everything. If you don't own a deep freezer and buy chicken or ground beef 100 lbs at a time when it's on sale, IMHO it's stupid as heck to buy a celeron. You can save that much money on buying white wrap groceries, cheaper beer, whatever.
I'd rather have nothing than own a celeron based computer right now. Some say you wouldn't notice the difference in office apps, but I use computers enough at work that I notice. And the difference is enough to me that without exception when it's my own hardware, I'll spend the extra money to get quality non-crippled parts. If I was an IT manager making a purchasing decision for a huge corporation then maybe it would be different, but even then it's interesting to know that the USAF does not buy celerons. They get mainstream processors because they know that the cost savings are not worth the reduced workplace efficiency. We're still using P3-350s with 128 meg ram here at work, loaded down with SMS, winxp, and all that hideous remote management crap. If those were celerons, they'd be unusable, but we get another year or so out of them.
Even the thermal properties of the celerons aren't all that great. A "real" pentium M in a real centrino system kicks butt in thermal and power management over a celeron, even though the celeron is running at lower clock speeds, lower FSB, and with most of the cache unpowered. And the cost difference for the chip itself is on the order of $100. Save your pennies, drive to work at 60 instead of 70 to get better gas mileage, do whatever you have to in order to save that extra $100, and buy a real cpu.
