 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Solutions: What governs the speed of a PC?
By JOHN TORRO Q. I was told by a computer tech that the speed of a computer is governed by the operating system. I have also been told that the more random access memory one has the faster the speed. Who is correct? A. The speed and performance of a computer are a combination of several factors. Your processor (the CPU chip) is the fastest component in your PC. It processes the actual computer instructions, most of which will contain references to memory, or RAM, access. This access to memory is many orders of magnitude slower than the processor speed. When physical RAM is full or when data must be brought into RAM from the hard disk, things slow down further. One analogy might be to think of the processor as a jet plane, RAM as an automobile and disk access as a person walking. Okay, so what does all this mean in relationship to running programs on PCs? All programs use these three components (CPU, RAM and disk). The goal is to make sure the CPU spends as little time as possible waiting for the RAM and disk to do their work. The faster your CPU, the more instructions will be processed per cycle; the more RAM you have, the less time the CPU has to wait for contents to be brought into memory; the faster hard disk you have, the faster those contents can be transferred to and from memory. A system without enough memory will be spending its time transferring data to and from the hard disk and will run very slow (think jet, automobile and person walking). And while RAM is probably the most important factor in today's computing environment, once a system has enough memory to satisfy the requirements of the applications it runs, adding more memory has little, if any, benefit. There are other miscellaneous components that factor in to overall system speed, and the operating system (which is responsible for locks, context switches and disk/memory management) is one of them. However, it's not to the same degree as the big three of CPU, RAM and hard disk. Blocking an e-mail addressQ. I added e-mail addresses to a "block" list in Outlook Express, but I cannot get this feature to work in Outlook. Any suggestions? A. It's much easier to do this in Outlook. Right-click the message in your Inbox that is from the e-mail sender that you want to block, click Junk E-mail, then Add to Junk E-mail List. Future messages from this address will be automatically deleted. An Office problemQ. When I start up my computer, I receive the following error message: "Osa9 has caused an error in MSO9.DLL. Osa will now close. Try restarting your computer if this problem continues." I can't open Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Access. I have Office 2000 installed. I have restarted and have installed Office 2000 again, but nothing works. A. This is a known problem caused by several conditions. The solution is to upgrade Microsoft Office to service release 1A or higher. Go to office.microsoft.com/ and download the latest service pack. Where attachments goQ. I get attachments that I download and they immediately appear on my screen. Other times they go wherever they go (I don't know how to assign them to a certain area) and I can go to Documents, see the subject and open the attachment that way. How do I scan a photo or document to make sure it appears directly on the screen of the person to whom I am sending it? A. You can't. The attachment you send is a single file without any folder or directory properties. It is up to the receiving party and his e-mail application to download the attachment to a particular folder/directory.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
From Tech Times
From the AP |
