Hardware and software determine a computer’s speed. The CPU is the main processor, but other components like RAM and hard drives also affect speed. Installed software can slow down a computer, so managing processes can free up resources.
With the exception of the central processing unit (CPU), most hardware inside a computer has two numbers that can help determine the speed of the system. The first number is the amount of resource provided, such as the volume of a hard drive or the capacity of random access memory (RAM) chips. The second number is the operating speed of the hardware, which can slow down other components within a computer if it is set too low. The software also determines the speed of your computer, specifically how many programs, or processes, are running in the background and taking up your computer’s power and resources. Overall computer speed is ultimately largely determined by how well all the software and hardware components work together.
At the heart of a computer is the CPU, which is the main processor that performs most of the operations within a computer or delegates tasks to other components. The faster a CPU is, the faster the computer will run in most cases, although other factors can mitigate the increase in computer speed. The cache, which is a buffer between the CPU and hardware such as a hard drive, can slow down the CPU if it isn’t fast enough to feed information to the CPU or accept it quickly from the hardware. Also, circuits known as buses on the motherboard serve as the primary paths for reading from the hardware and must be as fast as the CPU. If these components are not assembled to have complementary speeds, the overall speed of the computer will be slower than expected.
The size and speed of your RAM can also affect the speed of your computer. RAM is used to keep information in a location that can be accessed quickly, allowing programs to run quickly and large data calculations to be performed efficiently. Like other components, RAM has a certain speed that determines how quickly information can be read from and written to it. If there is not enough RAM in a system, the computer will start using the hard drive as a virtual RAM disk, which is accessed at a much slower speed.
A computer’s hard drive, the physical storage device, can affect the speed of the computer. Aside from the speed of read and write operations and the amount of available space, which the operating system uses to temporarily store memory pages from RAM, a hard drive can suffer from disk fragmentation. Disk fragmentation occurs when information, such as a program or document, is not stored in consecutive memory locations but is instead spread across many areas of a hard drive. This means that the drive has to jump to several random physical locations to assemble a single file, slowing down execution. Regular defragmentation of a hard drive can solve this problem.
Installed software can also slow down your computer. When a computer initially starts up, some programs and drivers are loaded into memory. Many of these are vital to the functioning of your computer, but some are not and simply take up memory, processor cycles, and potentially network bandwidth. Managing the amount of processes running at any given time, as well as other programs that may be in the background, can significantly speed up your computer and free up valuable resources for other programs.
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