Another go faster stripe on your Computer
Concentrating on the microprocessor that is in your computer as far as performance is concerned is not the thing to do. You may have been asked several times, "How much RAM have you got ?". There are several different black boxes inside your computer that all add up to make it into a good computer.
RAM (Random Access Memory) is a temporary store used by the microprocessor. Random Access memory can be written to and read from. You may have heard about ROM ( read only memory) but we are not going to cover that here, there is no real need.
The microprocessor uses Ram as a store while making calculations. While you are typing into a word processor, the text that you enter is stored in Ram. It is not until you select SAVE that it is stored to disk. If a program does not have enough Ram to store what you type then you will not be able to type anymore ! It may be that the computer uses the disk as a backup to memory, the program may sense that Ram is becoming low and store the text that is off the screen to disk, it will reload that data when you require it. This is were things slow down.
Ram is much faster than disk. There are two types of disk. The hard (or fixed ) disk and the floppy disk. Most computers have both. A disk can be used just as Ram but is much slower. The strategy described in the previous paragraph would not work with a computer that does not have a fixed disk.
So the more Ram you have the less likely the computer will access the disk for temporary storage. This will make the computer a lot faster. The next question is ,"How much memory ?" That depends on what you are doing. As computers become more powerful, the software that is written requires more power. At present for a PC 16MB seems to be the recommended size for most applications. For certain applications doubling this up to 32MB will give you massive increases in speed. An upgrade above 32MB might not show any improvement at all unless you are doing heavy work ( one such heavy weight is Microsoft Developer studio ).
It used to be the case that you could select disk drives of differing quality and speed. The size of the disk drive seems to be the only thing to look at.
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