RAM Speed
The speed of your RAM(Random Access Memory) is a very important part of your overall system speed. RAM is easy and cheap to upgrade. You just buy a RAM card and plug it into your motherboard.
Whenever you run a program, that program is loaded from your hard drive to your RAM memory. Because you RAM is faster, than your hard drive, that makes the program data faster to access for other parts of your PC, like your CPU. When you turn your PC off everything on the RAM is wiped clean.
How much RAM do you need?
If you are running a large program or many programs you might not have enough memory. In that case your PC has to swap parts of the data to and from the hard drive as they are needed(swapping). This slows down your computer system greatly. Currently I would recommend 1-2 GB RAM, depending on your needs. If you have less you might look into upgrading.
My computer system is running slow, is it the RAM?
You can easily test for this. Run the programs that you usually do until your PC starts responding sluggishly.
XP:
press ctrl+alt+del
Click on the performance tab.
Look for "physical memory".
Then underneath that, "available".
If the number is less than 10,000 the problem is lack of memory.
Vista:
Vista uses memory differently, so you can't check for this in Vista. With Vista you should have at least 1 GB of RAM.
What type of RAM does my PC use?
There are several types of RAM(DDR1,DDR2,DDR3...). Your motherboard will only support some of these. You can find out which ones are supported in your motherboard book.
This is a picture of a DDR2 RAM DIMM
The picture shows 3 RAM DIMMs on a motherboard.
DDR3 is fairly new, your PC probably uses DDR1 or DDR2.
RAM speed is measured in MHz. The higher the number the faster the RAM.
Hard Drive Speed
Your hard drive is one of the core components of your system. The other two being your memory and your CPU. When you run an application the application's data is loaded from your hard drive to your memory. Then data is moved from your memory to your chip, where it is processed. With larger applications quite a bit of data might have to be moved between your memory and your hard drive. If you have a slow hard drive, it can become a bottleneck bringing down the speed of you whole system.
Parts of a hard drive
You usually don't see the inside of a hard drive, they are closed up pretty good. But if you did open one you would be able to spot 3 parts. The rotating disks, on which the data is electromagnetically stored, the disk head that reads and writes data from the disks and the buffer. Data is read into the buffer before it is moved from and too the memory.
The very cool movie below shows you just what a operating hard drive looks like, on the inside.
Speed factors
The speed of a hard drive is generally measured in RPM (revolutions per minute). That is how many times the fixed disks, mentioned above, rotate in a minute. Generally the more the better. A standard drive would have a RPM of 5,400 a high end drive would have 7,200 and a gamer drive would have 10,000. It is generally not advisable to go faster than that, because it brings the maximum storage capacity of the drive down significantly.
Another factor is the buffer size of the drive. The larger the buffer the faster the drive retrieves data.
Drive breakage
As you will have noticed hard drives have moving parts. This makes them prone to breaking down. It is therefor advisable to backup the data on those drives. You might want to read best external backup drive and backup software to find out more about backing up your data.
Trusted hard drive brands
It is just not worth buying a hard drive from a unknown company, I strongly recommend you stick to the following brands:
SATA or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment is the newest development in hard drive technology. It is a new connection or bus between a hard drive and a motherboard. The technology has borrowed from Firewire and USB and has been successful in decreasing hard drive response times by quite a bit.
You can find more information on SATA on Wikipedia.
Testing your drive
If you are interested in knowing how your drive stacks up, why not use this free hard drive speed test software.
System Speed Test
In order to increase the speed of your system you must first know how fast it is. You can break system speed test into 2 categories: testing your internet connection and testing your hardware.
Testing your internet connection
Testing your internet connection it is done between your home PC system and a nearby server. You will be measuring your bandwith(kb/s) and your ping (ms). Your bandwith is how much data you can move over your line in kilobits per second. Your upload and download load bandwith will probably be different, with the dowload one being higher. Most people only need about 500 kb/s a higher end user might want 1,000 kb/s. Your bandwith is important when downloading large files, such as movies.
The other factor is your ping. This is the time it takes for a packet of data to travel to the server and back. You want your ping to be 10-100 ms with lower being better. Your ping is important when you play online games.
You can test your internet connection speed for free at SpeedTest.net
Testing your PC speed
There are several pieces of hardware which affects your system's speed and performance:
The software that does this for free is not as good as the ones that you pay for, but here are some options:
Fresh Diagnostics
Test my hardware
The speed of your RAM(Random Access Memory) is a very important part of your overall system speed. RAM is easy and cheap to upgrade. You just buy a RAM card and plug it into your motherboard.
Whenever you run a program, that program is loaded from your hard drive to your RAM memory. Because you RAM is faster, than your hard drive, that makes the program data faster to access for other parts of your PC, like your CPU. When you turn your PC off everything on the RAM is wiped clean.
How much RAM do you need?
If you are running a large program or many programs you might not have enough memory. In that case your PC has to swap parts of the data to and from the hard drive as they are needed(swapping). This slows down your computer system greatly. Currently I would recommend 1-2 GB RAM, depending on your needs. If you have less you might look into upgrading.
My computer system is running slow, is it the RAM?
You can easily test for this. Run the programs that you usually do until your PC starts responding sluggishly.
XP:
press ctrl+alt+del
Click on the performance tab.
Look for "physical memory".
Then underneath that, "available".
If the number is less than 10,000 the problem is lack of memory.
Vista:
Vista uses memory differently, so you can't check for this in Vista. With Vista you should have at least 1 GB of RAM.
What type of RAM does my PC use?
There are several types of RAM(DDR1,DDR2,DDR3...). Your motherboard will only support some of these. You can find out which ones are supported in your motherboard book.
This is a picture of a DDR2 RAM DIMM
The picture shows 3 RAM DIMMs on a motherboard.
DDR3 is fairly new, your PC probably uses DDR1 or DDR2.
RAM speed is measured in MHz. The higher the number the faster the RAM.
Hard Drive Speed
Your hard drive is one of the core components of your system. The other two being your memory and your CPU. When you run an application the application's data is loaded from your hard drive to your memory. Then data is moved from your memory to your chip, where it is processed. With larger applications quite a bit of data might have to be moved between your memory and your hard drive. If you have a slow hard drive, it can become a bottleneck bringing down the speed of you whole system.
Parts of a hard drive
You usually don't see the inside of a hard drive, they are closed up pretty good. But if you did open one you would be able to spot 3 parts. The rotating disks, on which the data is electromagnetically stored, the disk head that reads and writes data from the disks and the buffer. Data is read into the buffer before it is moved from and too the memory.
The very cool movie below shows you just what a operating hard drive looks like, on the inside.
Speed factors
The speed of a hard drive is generally measured in RPM (revolutions per minute). That is how many times the fixed disks, mentioned above, rotate in a minute. Generally the more the better. A standard drive would have a RPM of 5,400 a high end drive would have 7,200 and a gamer drive would have 10,000. It is generally not advisable to go faster than that, because it brings the maximum storage capacity of the drive down significantly.
Another factor is the buffer size of the drive. The larger the buffer the faster the drive retrieves data.
Drive breakage
As you will have noticed hard drives have moving parts. This makes them prone to breaking down. It is therefor advisable to backup the data on those drives. You might want to read best external backup drive and backup software to find out more about backing up your data.
Trusted hard drive brands
It is just not worth buying a hard drive from a unknown company, I strongly recommend you stick to the following brands:
- Seagate
- Buffalo
- Western Digital
- Maxtor
SATA or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment is the newest development in hard drive technology. It is a new connection or bus between a hard drive and a motherboard. The technology has borrowed from Firewire and USB and has been successful in decreasing hard drive response times by quite a bit.
You can find more information on SATA on Wikipedia.
Testing your drive
If you are interested in knowing how your drive stacks up, why not use this free hard drive speed test software.
System Speed Test
In order to increase the speed of your system you must first know how fast it is. You can break system speed test into 2 categories: testing your internet connection and testing your hardware.
Testing your internet connection
Testing your internet connection it is done between your home PC system and a nearby server. You will be measuring your bandwith(kb/s) and your ping (ms). Your bandwith is how much data you can move over your line in kilobits per second. Your upload and download load bandwith will probably be different, with the dowload one being higher. Most people only need about 500 kb/s a higher end user might want 1,000 kb/s. Your bandwith is important when downloading large files, such as movies.
The other factor is your ping. This is the time it takes for a packet of data to travel to the server and back. You want your ping to be 10-100 ms with lower being better. Your ping is important when you play online games.
You can test your internet connection speed for free at SpeedTest.net
Testing your PC speed
There are several pieces of hardware which affects your system's speed and performance:
- CPU
- Hard Drives
- CD-Rom
- DVD player
- Sound card
- Graphics card
- RAM
The software that does this for free is not as good as the ones that you pay for, but here are some options:
Fresh Diagnostics
Test my hardware