Ok so yesterday me and my friends got an "ounce" of schwag for $35. We haven't smoked in a month or two so it got us pretty high, then after that one of our other friends came over and spent the night at our house and we were high for like 5 hours, it was great. Then today I learned I had won a FREE LAPTOP! I entered a raffle a week ago and ended up getting a free Acer Aspire 5516 laptop! 2gb of RAM and a 1.6GHz processor. I know the processor sucks penis though. It's a single core and it's still that low. And my old laptop was a HP dv6000, with a Core 2 Duo 1.86GHz processor and 1gb of RAM. So right now I'm currently wondering which one I should keep and which one I should give to my friend. I can upgrade my old laptop to 2gb of RAM for $28, but there are numerous small things that make this new laptop better than the old one anyways. Oh yea and is the processor even that important? What does having a faster processor even speed up? Will it make a difference in Photoshop or WoW or iTunes?
Your dual core is much better. The processor does make that much big of a difference, and that is a huge difference. I can't even believe they still make single core, THAT LOW. The new one, I would sell or give to a buddy.
Having a faster processor, in general, means that you can execute more operations in a given period of time than a slower processor of the same architecture. Those operations are, on the most basic level, are addition, subtraction, bit shifting, memory access. All of this is slightly complicated by the fact that we've moved away from the "Gigahertz race" since we're approaching the upper limit of how much heat can be removed from the chip with our standard cooling methodology. This is, as you've noted why we have processors with multiple cores running at slower clock speeds. </nerd rant> To answer your question, it means that you can typically do more things in a given period of time. That being said, whenever I buy a computer, I buy the faster processor that my budget can afford because it's something that you can't really upgrade later on down the line. A hard drive and RAM are usually things that I will upgrade after about 6 months or so, depending. My recommendation for you: keep the laptop with fastest processor and upgrade the RAM.