Pardon a silly question about Computers and their speed...?

hypothetically, which would be the faster computer. A 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 computer purchased 3 years ago, or one bought now which is a dual core 2.0 GHz computer.

I ask this question because I see new computers being advertised with much lowe GHz speeds than were being advertised 3 or 4 years ago. But yet, one gets the impression these newer computers are supposed to be better and faster. Please explain.

Pardon a silly question about Computers and their speed...?norton ghost

When a cpu gets up around 2GHz it's going to handle a huge amt. of work. To say one of those machines is going to be 'faster' than the other will have to be measured in nanoseconds. This is hypothetically speaking.

Speaking practically, you wouldn't see any actual speed difference unless you went to some trouble to try to 'bog' them down.

The dual core will handle more large tasks at once but they would have to be much larger than ordinary stuff. There's much too much attention paid to the 'speed' of computers when, in fact, that speed could only be measured in the most minute increments.