Centrino???

Hey everyone, sorry for my ignorance, but I'm a newbie to notebooks but I need to buy one for school and some games. I've seen all this Centrino stuff, but don't really understand what it is, why the clock speed is so low and how comparable is it to other notebook chips. I'd really appreciate it if someone took the time to answer my question or pointed to a good website explaining everything.

Thanks alot everyone.

Centrino is a new CPU from Intel. The CPU is called the Pentium M (or Banias) and at the moment has clock speeds of 1.4, 1.5 and 1.6GHz (soon 1.7GHz) - at 1.6GHz it compares more-or-less to a Pentium 4 2.4/2.5GHz. The Pentium M is better than the Pentium 4-m in terms of how thrifty it is (i.e. it produces far greater battery life).

The reason it performs so well at a low clock speed, is its relatively short pipeline and 1MB L2 Cache.

A notebook can only be called Centrino if it has the Pentium M processor, the corresponding Intel chipset, and an Intel Wireless card. If for instance the manufacturer of a notebook puts their own WiFi card in, it may not have a Centrino sticker, only one that says Pentium-M.

Who's General Failure and why's he reading my disk?