by Kent Davidson

Created on: January 31, 2009

There are only a few tried-and-true ways to make your computer faster: more memory, faster disks, and fewer background processes. You can, of course, but a newer computer with a faster processor, but let's assume you want to keep your current computer.

Let's discuss them each one at a time:

More Memory:

First, let's disambiguate a computer's memory and hard disk drive. Memory is known as "short-term" storage for a computer: It's fast to access (microseconds), but if you turn off the power, you lose everything in the memory. Memory is usually measured in megabytes (1048576 = 1024 x 1024 bytes) or gigabytes (1073741824 = 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes). Most new computers in 2009 come with 2 gigabytes (2GB) of memory standard, but you can add more for additional cost.

Your disk (or hard drive) is "long-term" storage for a computer. Access is "slower" (milliseconds), but when you turn off the power, everything remains intact. Hard drives are measured in gigabytes, and the typical new computer these days comes with at least a 320 GB hard disk drive.

Most operating systems (Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows Vista, for example) support a means by which you can run a lot of programs simultaneously without having enough memory to hold them all at the same time. They use something called virtual memory, which takes the programs you are not using and puts them temporarily onto the disk (called swap space) and only hold the programs you are using in memory.

Now, remember, disk is slow (relatively) - memory is fast. If you have 2GB of memory, and you run programs which exceed that 2GB (which most people do), then your computer is taking time to write the "unused" memory to and from disk.

Increasing your memory will therefore speed your computer up if you do a lot of things at once which require a lot of memory. Web browsing, these days, takes up more and more memory with video and other media streaming...

Faster disk:

Now, as I mentioned, disk accesses are "slow" (again, relative to other speeds in computer) - and most disk drives have a metric associated with them called "access time." This is the amount of time after a request to read a file that the hard disk drive is ready to read the request.

The second metric associated with a disk drive is the "throughput." This is how fast the drive can read data into memory from the disk. Throughput times are measured in gigabytes per second.

You can increase your throughput easily by running a disk defragmentation tool on your hard drive regularly.

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