There are 4 basic components that determine the speed of your computer.
They are:
- CPU or Central Processing Unit. Think of this as your brain. This is the Intel or AMD chip that is the brains of your computer. Intel is the market leader with the most powerful chips in the world. Intel currently holds about 80% of the marketplace. AMD is a competitor to Intel. Their market value is price. If you purchased a rock bottom priced computer chances are it has an AMD processor. What does this mean to you – nothing! Years ago there was a compatibility issue with AMD and some programs but this is not an issue for consumer grade computers. The bad news is CPU’s cannot be upgraded. The good news is you rarely would ever need to if your computer is less than 3 years old. Today’s computers have more processing power than you could ever need for 80% of all users.
- Memory. Think of this as your memory in your mind. All programs require memory to run. Think of how you read. Words come off the paper and into your mind. Now how much can you remember without
writing it down. Can you remember things faster than you write them down or read them? The answer is yes and the same is true for your computer – except they do not remember less with age! If your computer is low on memory resources it then has to write it down on the hard disk (see below for hard disk explanation). This operation can really slow performance down on a computer. The brain is processing information as fast as possible. It then hands it to memory. If memory gets full then it has to write it to the drive and then read it back as it needs it. The good news is memory is really cheap and if you need a memory upgrade is fairly simple.
- Hard Drive or disk space. Think of this as a file cabinet. In order to save information for later use it has to be filed away in the cabinet. Does not matter if it is a word document, an excel program, or picture – it needs to go in the file cabinet (hard drive). The good news is hard drive space is really cheap and most computer manufacturers are putting ridiculous amounts of hard drive space on computers. Rarely does hard drive space or performance have any real impact on performance.
- Operating system. Microsoft has proven that really good marketing can take a mediocre product and make it popular. Put another way – Macintosh users are not looking how to make my computer faster! Windows has it’s issues and it is those issues we will be spending the most time on fixing and tweaking. Windows is very easy to “mess up”. From registry errors, spyware, viruses and more.
