A few months ago I read an article at register.co.uk in which Intel stated that certain CPUs from certain production lines (call me Celeron) become 10% to 15% slower after 5 - 10 years. It's somekind of semiconductor third-age, they said.
And I am able to verify this.
My brother bought a 466 MHZ Celeron pc back in 2000. Unsirprisingly it's performance sucked. Only 900 marks on 3dMark 2000 right after a clean intallation of windows with the latest drivers for graphics and sound.
6 years later I was called to format the hard drive and reinstall windows 98 because (unsurprisingly again) the old setup got seriously messed up. Again win98 , same driver set, 3dmark 2000.... guess what.... 762 marks!
My brother will need another computer pretty soon
