Make your computer faster – don’t fall for the hype

“My computer is only a year old and it’s incredibly slow, why?”

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard this phrase. Here’s the rub: Computer manufacturers, or should I say assemblers, should be able to give you numbers so you can buy another computer every 2-3 years. They don’t want you to upgrade because they make less money that way. If they say a 3ghz processor will make your computer run faster than a 2ghz processor, you’ll probably take the bait.

Guess what! It’s not that easy.

Let’s talk about how a computer works and then we can talk about how to make yours faster.

Tear:

1. The fans kick in and start to cool things down before they get too hot. approximately 2 – 5 sec.

2. The motherboard performs a power-on self-test of all hardware components it can or will. about 3-8 sec.

3. The motherboard searches the drive partitions for an operating system. there is no time

4. The operating system kernel is loaded into memory. The amount loaded depends on how much RAM you have, so yes, more RAM causes more to be loaded into kernel memory. By the way, the kernel is the main part of the operating system that you need to run at all times, the core functionality. [Depends on the speed of the hard drive and the amount of ram, but usually between 10secs to a minute]

5. The user interface is loaded (on Windows it is explorer.exe)

6. Services, print queue, wireless zero, earnings, etc. are started. [about 5 – 10 sec]

7. Programs you have installed that start at Windows startup are loaded into memory [depends on # of progs]

8. The wireless network connection tries to connect to the nearest router. [depends on network card etc, but usually about 3 – 10 secs]

Note that loading the kernel takes more time. This depends on the amount of RAM and the speed of the hard drive, as well as the amount of fragmentation. Fragmentation is when a file breaks into pieces and is distributed among the sectors that make up the hard drive.

Your hard drive has a seek time that tells you an average of how long it takes to find a part of a file on the hard drive. The slowest hard drives have a seek time of about 12 ms and the fastest hard drives have a seek time of as little as 4 ms.

Once the hard drive has found the file it has to load that file into RAM and then the CPU can do what it needs with that file or piece of data, this speed depends on the hard drive bit rate or mbps or megabits per second. Most hard drives have a speed of between 30 and 40 mbps, if the data is not fragmented.

When it comes to speed, the hard drive is the biggest bottleneck, but before we talk about that, let’s talk about exactly what part of your computer is used for common applications.

A. The most common, of course, is a web browser.

one. static-htmlFirst, your internet connection is the limiting factor, because we have to wait for you to download the images and html and THEN the browser can process the content you downloaded. Needless to say, your CPU can process this much faster than it can be pulled from the web.

two. HTML + JavaScript – Same limitations as n. #1, except that depending on the complexity of the javascript, performance may depend on the speed of the CPU and its ability to execute the javascript because this is a 100% CPU operation once the script has been downloaded.

3. Flash – same as #2, flash engine speed depends on CPU

Four. Live streaming video – Depends on your internet connection speed, CPU and video card. The CPU processes the video, the video card processes it, and pushes it out to the monitor (keep in mind, however, that any computer less than 8-10 years old will handle non-HD video just fine). The Internet connection determines the video bit rate that we can see. At 5mbps internal. with. can handle 500k video etc.

B. Microsoft Word

*this app won’t benefit much from a faster computer, it’s just not as intense

1. opening word: it is loaded into memory by the hard disk, the CPU represents the user interface

2. Ongoing spelling and grammar checking: CPU dependent, though your computer would have to be very slow to tell the difference.

3. Loading Large Documents: The speed of the hard drive determines the initial load time, and the RAM + CPU determines how well you can manipulate the document and whether it stutters when scrolling.

C. Video games

1. The initial loading of the game may be slower or faster depending on the speed of the hard drive.

2.game

in. the frame rate depends on the hard drive providing the content, the ram gives the hard drive a larger storage place for the current content and the video card + CPU handle rendering and polygons etc.

** no current games that I know of take advantage of the dual core CPU at all.

d photoshop

1. initial load – depends on the hard drive

2. apply filters – cpu

3. open and manipulate a large document – ram + cpu + video card

** not optimized for dual core

E. Viewing digital photos in Windows Explorer

1. opening photos – hard drive

* If you’ve ever wondered why Windows Explorer sometimes takes a while to display drives and folders, this is 100% due to the speed of your hard drive and the percentage of fragmentation.

Conclusion:

Look at the table and find out which activities you do the most to determine which components you need to update. EVERYONE will benefit from a faster hard drive and more RAM, it’s very simple.

I highly recommend getting multiple hard drives and setting them up in a raid to boost performance across the board.

printing [windows button] + r. Type msconfig. Deselect all of these options and reboot.

UNFRAME your hard drive once a week. Did I mention getting more than one hard drive? You need to do it now.

go to my computer->right click on the drive->properties->tools->defragmenter.

Get as much ram as you can.