I wouldn't go for the Celeron - it has no level 2 cache, yet is (roughly)
the same price as an XP 2500 w/ Barton core.
The Pentium 4 would prob. be (roughly) 60% more expensive, would prob. not
be new enough for hyper-threading (for what *that's* worth!), but would
normally have a 1024 k of l2 cache. However, given that you could get a
XP2800 w/ heatsink and fan for the same price as a P4 2.4 GhZ, I figure it's
a no-brainer.

Having said all that, I haven't owned an Intel processor since a 386 SX 25
"back in the day"...

As to performance, my machine at work is a Celeron 1.2 with 512MB PC133 RAM,
and it works fine for VS.NET (it generally has VB 6, VS.NET,browser, e-mail,
TextPad, messenger, etc. running). My home machine is an XP 1800, with 768MB
DDR RAM which works great. The sort of processors you're looking at would be
more than ample for development work - just make sure you get lots of nice,
fast DDR RAM and a fast hard drive, to prevent these being bottlenecks.

hth,

Rowland.