This article was written in February 2008. Some computer specs may be out of date.
Technology often gets a bad rap for being hard to understand or being far too complicated to use. While there are aspects of technology that are complicated, there are many “common” terms that people will often glaze over because they don’t think they can understand what is being talked about.
Take computer specifications, for example. When companies are trying to sell computers they will plaster their boxes and pamphlets with processor speed, amount of RAM, hard drive space, graphics processor trying to get consumers interested in their product. Many of the consumers, however, have no idea what any of those things mean and the second they see words like “2.6 Ghz” their eyes glaze over and they stop paying attention.
In this article I want to explain some of these computer terms to help build a better understanding of the computer and how it works. It is can be relatively simple when looked at from the correct light; my goal is to get the correct lighting.
The computer processor, also referred to as the CPU (Central Processing Unit) of the computer is the most predominant term used when describing a computer. The computer processor is the engine of the computer, it is the small little chip that does all the calculations. Today processors speed is measured in “Gigahertz” (Ghz). The larger the Ghz, the faster the computer is able to process things. Most computers today are between 2 and 3 Ghz in speed.
For the processor to function at optimum speed it needs to have enough RAM. RAM, which stands for Random Access Memory (no, you don’t need to remember that), is another term that is thrown around quite regularly. RAM, also called ‘memory’ at times, is like basket that holds information about what the computer is doing. The processor then takes the information from the basket and processes it as it needs too. RAM is measured in MB (Megabytes) and GB (Gigabytes). Today it is recommended that a computer has at least 512 MB of RAM and now even 1 GB (1024 MB) of RAM is almost standard. If a computer seems to be running really slowly it is often because it does not have enough RAM and adding more RAM would speed the computer up.
A computer’s hard drive might also affect the computer’s performance. Hard drives store the computer’s data on metallic disks for safe keeping. Hard drives are measured by their storage capacity. Today hard drive capacity ranges from 40 GB (again, measured in Gigabytes, just like RAM is) to 750 GB. Some high end drives are now even talking about having a Terabyte capacity which is the equivalent to 1024 GB. It is easy to see that the more space on the drive, the more room there is for documents, music and pictures.
A hard drive can affect a computer’s performance in a couple different ways the first of which is drive speed. Hard drive disks have a limit of how fast they can spin around, this is known as RPM (revolutions per minute.) The RPM of the hard drive affects how fast data can be read or written to the hard drive, so if the hard drive has a low RPM it will take longer to load the data into the RAM and the processor might have to wait for data to be loaded from the hard drive. Most laptop computer drives have speed of 4800 or 5400 RPM, which is actually considered slow for drives. Most desktop computer drives have a speed of 7200 RPM which is noticeably faster. (A few high end drives offer 10000 RPM drives, but these are usually reserved for special use.)
The second way that a hard drive can affect a computer’s performance is when it is filled with data. Because the programs that the computer runs take more RAM to run then the computer creates something called VRAM which stands for Virtual Random Access Memory or just Virtual Memory. What this means is that the computer sets aside part of the hard drive and pretends like it is RAM. When the computer does this it is using 5-15 GB of space on the hard drive just to keep everything running smoothly. But if there is less than 10 GB of free space on the hard drive the computer will slow down because it won’t be able to give itself enough virtual memory. Freeing up space on the hard drive or getting a second hard drive is a good way to solve this type of slowdown.
Hopefully this helps to shed some light on understanding of these technology issues and maybe even helps to clear up a few problems.
