Why would it take my computer 85 seconds to open Visual Studio and create a WPF project?

"Simple -

Celerons suck!

(If you are a developer, Power user or actually need performance)

Celerons do the job when you do not need performance and want the benefits such as low cost and low power (I use one in my NAS as it never goes above 20% usage).

Also, the fact is, You can never compare ghz for ghz, the generation makes a big difference, for example, my 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo laptop is about 5 (if not more) times faster than my 3.0ghz Pentium 4 desktop.

For your information, the cheapest (in production) Core 2 CPU is around £80, where as the cheapest Celeron is around £25.

What they do is basically get the mainstream CPU and rip out a lot of the features such as cache and other algorithms that give the mainstream CPU its ""Umph""!

If you want to do a detailed comparison of what one CPU has and the other doesn't, I recommend you use CPU-Z"

"CPU is rarely an issue for Visual Studio, disk I/O performance is far more important.

This is probably a disk i/o throughput issue...fragmentation or something else. Start off with a quick scan with hdtune or some other disk utility to see how access times etc differ between the two disks. Once a low level I/O issue has been ruled out by hdtune performance metrics, check for fragmentation.

(I'm assuming you have checked that there are no backend services; ngen/indexing/etc keeping the machine busy?)

...or do you by any chance run norton antivirus or some other malware on the slower desktop machine..?"