This is the third part of the topic series here in my blogsite. In the first two post I made about your computers' speed, we talked about the effects of RAM and your Harddisk (harddrive) capacity. In this post we have your processor and your video memory to discuss.

Not all people really understands what the computers' processor is. To put it simply, it is the actual central processing unit (CPU). Most people just refer to the CPU as the box tower without knowing what's inside it. Well, that box tower you are seeing is actually just a case covering your computer's components composing your CPU and the main core is the processor.

The processor can be said to be the computer's brain as it is the one doing all the computing requirements and it is where all your commands to your computer passes through to do what you want to do. The way it works is, for example, you open your MS Word and type something and then printed your document. Upon pressing your keyboard's keys you are giving an instruction to the computer to show the letters or numbers you typed onto your screen. Those instructions passes through your processor and it likewise send the command to your monitor. Also, upon printing your document, the processor sends your print command to your printer and thus it obeys and prints out what it receives. Now that you understand something about what it is, lets discuss about how it affects your computer's speed.

We now know that the processor is where everything goes by on your computer. It then follows the simple matter called usage capacity. One more point is that processors are labeled with their processing speeds. These are the numbers you see when you buy a computer but more often than not you don't really know what it means. These are the numbers with Ghz on side which means Gigaherts. Just like the measurement of the harddisks "giga" is derived from "mega" wherein 1,000 megahertz compose 1 gigahertz. During the years where pentium 4 was released I believed the last number I saw was about 3.8Ghz or 4.1Ghz. What happened next is the Dual-cores were born and now we have the Quad-cores. Let me expand on this. On my example in the previous paragraph, you typed something into your MS Word and then printed it. This is a simply command that your processor can handle. But then we have something called multi-tasking which means that you are running multiple programs simultaneously. In the example, let's say you were also playing music with your media player while also browsing the internet on side and then have an excel spreadsheet open and then doing a virus scan process. All of these tasks go through your processor and if your processor can't handle it then you either get stuck (your PC hangs) or you are significantly slowed down.

The manufacturer of the marketed processors now have dual-cores and the quad-cores. What this means is they put more than one processing core into a single microchip that is used by your computer. I don't know exactly know how your computer utilizes it but the simply explanation would be that you now have in effect multiple processors at hand in one computer. So to lessen the burden of task on to one processor, the tasks are now allocated to each of the cores. Like in the same example above, consider that the MS Word document, the excel spreadsheet and the internet browsing is being done through "core 1" and the virus scanning and the media player is on "core 2". You now have a visual idea of how it affects your computer speed. Likewise as I said above, these processors have speed measurements. So if you are considering a computer that shows a 3.8Ghz single core against a 1.8Ghz dual-core then you may want to think which would be more beneficial to you.

Now a days, most laptops are still being sold using dual-core technology ranging from 1.8Ghz to 2.1Ghz processor speeds. Desktops are being marketed at Quad-core levels at similar speeds.

In my next post to this blog series, I will discuss about your Video Card's memory. I hope this helps! Cheers!