At least the Celeron can do something.

I find the atom is very bad at webpages. it takes an age to load anything longer than the screen.

And do not even try and load ebay site as do a search and its rubbish

I'm mainly on about netbooks and they cannot even do what they are called.

And what I find really stupid is my toshiba mb100 can play quake 3 at a decnt turn of speed yet it has problems trying to load a bloody webpage.

And yes I know about flash and images etc on a webpage..

The Atom may look good on paper, but for a desktop, I'd go with the celery without a second thought. As mentionned by Patrick, the Atom has a really narrow range of optimisation, and while adequately fast for most basic uses, its power is seriously limited. As far as netbooks go, it's not really a problem, but I suspect a desktop would run smoother with a celeron, even one running 400MHz slower. To be precise, I had a 701 with a 900MHz celeron, I now use a 900A with a 1,6 GHz Atom, and neither feels really slower nor faster than the other. But overall, the atom feels more "jerky".

I got a original Intel atom board in a mini ITX case. I found what you said to be true till I disabled Hyper Threading in the Bios. I bought it to use as a cheap DVR replacing a Celeron 800 which I was using at the time. The Celeron was outperforming it all around playing videos, games, and in recording the Celeron could record in the TV tuners "Medium" quality mode fine where the Atom was having issues with audio synch problems in the Medium mode and the video would black out at random.

Now I got the crazy idea to disable Hyper Threading and the Atom is performing as I expected. Plays almost any video I chuck at it, records at max resolution my tuner allows with no video or audio issues.

So if your having issues try disabling Hyper Threading in the BIOS because unless the programs your using are designed to use it efficiently it only causes issues IMO.

As far as I know, there's no option in my 900A bios to disable HT ; I've seen snapshots of some early asus atom bioses showing an option to that effect, but it has since been removed. Anyone knows if it's possible to disable HT on a live linux system (kernel option or something else ?). TIA.