I am the newest bee in the hive. I barely know what a bitcoin is. There is a great article in WIRED magazine about bitcoins. This led me to do google searches, etc.. download a wallet, bit miner pool website.
I like the hardware side of bitcoin and mining. My lowly celeron 440 just cant mine bitcoins fast enough. Any help getting started?
Welcome. If you want to get into mining, you first need to realize that mining with a CPU will cost you more in electricity than the bitcents it will generate. Your best bet is to get an AMD/ATI GPU. Something like a Radeon 58xx or 6950. A cheap 6870 is also not a bad choice. I am not bashing nVidia; it is just that nVidia architecture is poorly suited for bitcoin mining.
This <
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison> will give you an idea of the hash rates you can expect with various GPUs and CPUs. For example, an overclocked 6870 can provide 300MHash/s; compare to your Celeron 440 that does 2MHash/s. Yes, 150x slower.
You can then go here <
http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php> to give you an idea of how many bitcoins a given hashrate will provide you over time.