I saw my first intel atom computer the other day.

And it wasn’t a laptop. It was an Acer e-Machine EL1600

At first glance, Its seemed nice: 4 front USB ports, 4 rear USB ports, a DVD-RW, a small case, XP, a small monitor was also included.

At first, I didn’t even check the CPU… I just assumed it was a celeron, a low-end pentium, or a core2 duo.

I installed it and fired it up, I went through the install process, setup the internet connection, and then installed anti-virus, etc.

But as I was configuring it, something wasn’t right.

It felt slow… sluggish.

I thought: thats unusual for a new PC running XP. It should be faster than this. I’ve got 6 year old PCs that feel faster than this.

When I saw it was an Atom CPU, then the penny dropped: I had heard that Atoms were slower than celerons, but I didn’t expect then to be this slow.

According to some people, a 1.6Ghz Atom performs like a 800Mhz celeron. Well, it certainly feels like a sub-1Ghz computer.

Some people might think its worth it for the price… But in this case: I disagree. Pay a bit extra, and you will get something (non-Atom) that is substantially, and noticeably faster.