God, how can anyone say a 700 Mhz Pentium III is better than a Pentium 4? Why do the people hate the Pentium 4 so much anyways? Yeah, it needed more than 2 Ghz to really shine, but it did achieve the performance. I played through Oblivion and Morrowind on a 3.2 Ghz Pentium 4 rig, it rocked, and I had it connected to the internet and it was very fast until the hard drive died on me (but then, the HDD of my current i7 rig died yesterday and I'm posting this from a netbook, it is almost an unlucky rule for me that when I have a good PC, it's HDD will invariably die a horrible, early death).
Anyways, in my opinion the early to mid 2000s were in fact the best times for computing. End of properiatery APIs, PC graphics surpassed the consoles greatly, high resolutions became the norm, GPU memory grew from 8 MB to 128 MB, CPUs provided true, raw performance as opposed to multicore/"64-bit" bullshit that only a few new games can use and introduces countless incompatibilities (you have to do ini tweaks nowadays just to play Fallout 3, a 2008 game, because it freezes up on CPUs with more than 2 cores on default settings). Yeah the NetBurst architecture was not elegant or whatever, but it delivered the performance. If someone told my 11 year old self that after 10 years most processors will still max out at 3.2 Ghz I'd freaking cry.
I'm sorry if this disturbs anyone's Pentium II/Voodoo 2 romanticism or adorement of 2 Ghz CPUs with 4 cores (I don't want more cores damn it, give me performance).
By the way, my former Pentium 4 PC is still in use in my mother's office, I just used it yesterday, and it is still fast (through I obviously didn't play games on it now, its a work PC now after all).