I read an article a few days back on the history of the Intel and Motorola chips, and was aghast at what Intel did to cut corners to release the Pentium III and Celeron chips so quickly. Certain key innovations in chip design from the last decade were scrapped altogether to make the chips cheaper. A Celeron is a Pentium II with one of its most important parts, the instruction cache, removed, which means more memory accesses. The Pentium III is a Celeron with the instruction cache put back, but smaller than the II's, a significant math transistor removed, and a scheme for multiple simultaneous instruction processing which is hamstrung by its own design. The real problem comes with applications which were compiled in development systems like Microsoft C++ or CodeWarrior expecting different chips. The compiled code will run, but it was optimized for advantages in the earlier chips that were pulled out of the III, requiring more laborious work to execute at runtime. The article's author summed it up: if you own a PC, get one with an AMD chip. They aren't as snazzy on specs, but AMD takes the time to do the chip design right. Return anything with a PIII in it. Interestingly, most of those annoying Blue Man Group ads disappeared after this article was published. And for the record, whatever bottomless pit they kicked them into, as a Mac user I'll be more than glad to kick Jeff Goldblum in myself. The only thing those ads do for me is clarify why Geena Davis dumped him.