Tracy,

I read the thread again, and the ***1.7***GHz Celeron began to resound a bit more...
Chances are that this is one of the old Northwood Celeron chips -
THOSE Celerons had the 128KB second level cache size which was hurting the old Celerons like crazy and is much better sized in the new Prescott line.

So this is probably a socket 478 chip set - here my first try would be to exchange the cpu with one of the faster Prescott Celerons (256MB 2nd Cache, 2800MHz for a about $70 retail (guesstimates based on price here) and the slowest PIV's available 2400 - Northwood with 512MB cache for $150 or 2400 MHz Prescott with 1024 MB cache for about $170. Since this is runtime, the prescott celerons have probably the best price/perf ratio - the big second level cache is wonderful when compiling vcx with very large sets of include files and queries utilizing multiple large rushmore bitmaps, but in "normal" program execution not as necessary as in those 2 points. Running code not leaning heavily on rushmore could even be minimally faster on the celeron due to higher clock cycle - probably a toss-up in pure perf.

Reconfiguring each PC probably is worth the cost in added productivity, but can add up to quite a sum if you have a few hundred of those PC's. If it is a Northwood Celeron and exchanging for a Prescott Celeron helps, reconsider the tar and feathers idea. I was in a similar situation having to analyze and explain why the new vfp programs were abysmally slow on the then new shiny PII laptops compared to desktops. Those were HP's with an already abysmally slow Harddisk running NT4 with DMA disabled on 32 MB of RAM - ordered after some nice high level meetings without asking any advice from programming, testing or even HW support. Getting a few thousand 128MB laptop RAM bars installed for those machines without paying ridicously inflated HP RAM prices AND without violating contracts on hard- and software support was an interesting expirience - and since the DMA was enabled at the same time everybody was happy.


regards

thomas