[citation][nom]tpi2007[/nom]Well, actually the Atom does have some advantage. Unless you're talking about the P3 Tualatin, that has 512KB L2 Cache, which was rare on desktops, though you can find them in laptops, the all other P3's, including the normal Tualatins only had 256KB L2. And then you have to consider that the Atom has support for SSE2, and SSE3 which is a plus. And then there is the platform. The Atom has a 533 FSB compared to a 133 for the latest P3's. And P3's generally had PC133 RAM, compared to 533Mhz DDR2 or even 667Mhz for the netbook platform. So I'd say the Atoms are generally better suited. I'd keep a P3 for a Windows XP or a Linux based Media Center. I have a P3 at 1Ghz with a 26W TDP, which is still pretty good by today's standards (those were efficient processors.. then came the P4... and fortunately then Intel went back to the gold old architecture )[/citation]
The PIIIs are still very usable. I recently pulled a Shuttle MV25N motherboard with a PIII Coppermine 1.0B (also the 26 W version) and 256 MB PC100 off a surplus pile, stuck a NIC, SATA card, and a few HDDs in it and turned it into a file/print server. There is more than enough CPU and RAM for the task as I'm running the latest version of Debian in text mode, which takes a whopping 38 MB (no typo) of RAM. Sure, the PCI bus is horribly bottlenecked when I hammer at the disks, but it does pretty well for a unit from 2001.