Motherboard drivers??? is it worth it?

[fimbles]

Hey..

Just a question that has had me puzzled for quite some time..


Me and my brother both own pcs..

My pc specs..

Intel celeron 2.8 ghz processor
1 gig ram
radeon 9600 pro 256mbit graphics card..
windows xp home

My brothers specs..

intel 2.6 ghz pentium processor
512 meg ram
no graphics card
windows xp pro

The question is.. why does his pc seem to run faster than mine?? (startup,shutdown, web browsing, general windows browsing. ect.. not games of course..)

We both run the same firewall ect...both have a similar(few) background tasks running..

Theorys i have come to..

Windows xp pro is faster than home?? Obviously pentium vs celeron..??

Erm.. i have been advised to update my motherboard drivers. but since my pc runs pretty well i dont really want to take the risk.. any ideas?? thought would be most welcome!

Thanks in advance!!

 

[peterdiva]

There's no risk in updating the motherboard drivers(the motherboard BIOS yes).As for speed,there's a big difference between a Pentium and a Celeron.

 

[Nodsu]

Pentium is way faster than a Celeron and one can do wonders with some Windows tweaks. Also, the motherboard itself matters a lot. You can't compare some budget SiS chipset to cream of Intel for example.

You could run some generic benchmarks on both computers and see where the biggest differences are. The Sandra suite comes with benchmarks for disks, memory, CPU, etc.

You could gain some disk subsystem speed with motherboard drivers since these usually update the IDE controller drivers too.

 

[fimbles]

Thanks for the quick reply!

I i do update my bios though will it have much of a impact on overall performance?? i know pentium are a lot nippier than celerons (double L2 cache or something??) but would the 2.6 / 2.8 diffrence not level them out??
If not? what is the equivant pentium os say a celeron 2.8??

:?

 

[peterdiva]

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2004.html?modelx=33&model1=20&model2=42&chart=17