A few years ago, my oldest brother bought a Gateway 2000 laptop.  The
sticker claims that it's a Pentium II.

Over time, it's burned out a bit or two of itself, and has had to have
stuff repaired/replaced.

Recently, I bought the laptop off of my brother, since I wanted a laptop
(and he didn't really need it anymore, being more of a Mac user).

I promptly took MS-WINDOWS off of it and put NetBSD on it.  I notice that
the boot message log says:

cpu0: Intel Pentium/MMX (Tillamook) (586-class), 233.87 MHz

...on the other hand, I have a Gateway 2000 desktop that is identified as
an Intel Pentium II, and ``(Klamath)''.


I assume that this means that the CPU is really a plain Pentium.  But, I
haven't ever paid much attention to the (apparently various) sub-models
of CPU's.  I was curious if it might be sold by Intel as a Pentium II but
classified (for compatibility/etc.) by NetBSD as a plain Pentium.


(My oldest brother is a doctor, not a computer guy.  I haven't (yet) asked
him if the repair people possibly told him that they were replacing the
CPU with a Pentium, and he just didn't realize that that meant downgrading
the CPU.  Or maybe someone quietly swapped a Pentium in for a Pentium II
on the theory that no one would ever notice, and it would widen someone's
profit margin...)

(On at least one occasion, I believe that he had non-Gateway people work
on it.  My limited exerience with Gateway is that they are pretty good
about customer care (but they seem to only know about MS-WINDOWS).  I
don't think that they'd have swapped the CPU without discussing it with
my brother.))


This is mostly a point of curiosity.  I don't really expect to use the
machine for demanding tasks, so it's already overpowered (for me) anyway.
But I wonder about it...  Also, if the Tillamook was never sold as a
Pentium II, I should probably tell my brother to avoid whoever it was that
worked on it, if they didn't tell him that they were going to exchange the
CPU.


Thanks in advance...


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu