Laptop running slow

Posts Tagged ‘desktop computers’

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia SATA Serial ATA
First-generation (1.5 Gbit/s) SATA ports on a motherboard Year created 2003 Supersedes Parallel ATA (PATA) Capacity 1.5, 3.0, 6.0 Gbit/s Style Serial Hotplugging interface Yes[1] External interface Yes (eSATA)

Serial ATA (SATA)(Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) is a computer bus interface for connecting host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives and optical drives. Serial ATA was designed to replace the older ATA (AT Attachment) standard (also known as EIDE). It is able to use the same low level commands, but serial ATA host-adapters and devices communicate via a high-speed serial cable over two pairs of conductors. In contrast, the parallel ATA (the redesignation for the legacy ATA specifications) used 16 data conductors each operating at a much lower speed.

SATA offers several compelling advantages over the older parallel ATA (PATA) interface: reduced cable-bulk and cost (reduced from 80 wires to seven), faster and more efficient data transfer, and hot swapping.

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Last Updated: 10/03/2007

The Basics

While most users think of laptop computers as desktop computers you can carry around, that’s not always the case. True, some laptops are designed as desktop replacements, offering similar power and performance on the go. But many laptops have other tricks up their sleeves, serving as tablet PCs or multimedia players in a fashion that their desk-chained brethren could never match.

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Back in the 1960s the IBM 1401 was both state of the art and an engineering marvel. It filled up an entire room and weighed thousands of pounds; in today’s money it would cost about $1.5 million. The old 1401 could perform just over 4,000 calculations per second and at the time was virtually unmatched. Nowadays, the average mobile phone has a microchip about the size of your fingernail and can perform about 1 billion calculations per second.

Here are a few examples of famous predictions about computers that will surely go down in history.

• Thomas Watson of IBM stated in 1943 that he believed there was a world market for maybe five computers
• Popular Mechanics stated that in the future computers may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.
• An engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip asked “But what…is it good for?”
• Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak’s personal computer stated “So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you because we just want to do it. Pay our salary and we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.’”
• Ken Olson, President of Digital Equipment Corp, in 1977 stated that there is no need for any individual to have a computer in their home.

The exponential growth of computing power is utterly astonishing and will profoundly reshape all of human civilization. The most spectacular thing about it is the fact that our generation is smack dab in the middle of all of these transitions. By the year 2020, a chip with today’s processing power will cost about a penny, which is the cost of scrap paper we throw in the garbage. Children are going to look back and wonder how we could have possibly lived in such a meager world, much as when we think about how our own parents lacked the luxuries—cell phone, Internet—that we all seem to take for granted. Our world is already much, much smarter than 10 years ago and as computing power doubles every 18 months, it’s propelling us towards a radically different future.

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Tips For Speeding Up a Laptop

Laptop computers are generally slower overall than desktops, unless you spend thousands of dollars on the highest-performance “desktop replacements.” Portability is lovely but speed definitely matters, too. Here are some ways to speed up your laptop.

Replacing a standard 5400 rpm hard drive with a 33 percent faster 7200 rpm drive is probably the best investment you can make in a laptop. Disk read/write operations are the biggest bottleneck in all but the cheapest, underpowered laptops. Replacing a laptop’s hard drive is much easier than the same upgrade on a desktop machine. There’s usually just one screw to remove. Then you pull of the drive bay cover; pull out the hard drive; slip in the new one; format the new drive and install all your software and data. The restoration of programs and data is easier if you made a disk image copy before removing the old drive.

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Guide to Laptop Processors

The heart of any computer is the processor or CPU for short(central processing unit). There are quite a few brands and types of CPU’s available for laptops and trying to pick the right one can be confusing.

There are laptops that use desktop versions of the Athlon XP and Pentium 4, these are good for desktop replacements where battery life is not a concern. The advantage is speed and lower cost in exchange for heat and shorter battery life. The extra speed is due in part to a faster front side bus and sometimes higher speed memory that the desktop processors support.

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Speeding Up Laptop Performance

If you normally use a laptop computer, you may not think much about its performance, but if you switch between a laptop and a desktop computer, you may find that the laptop seems like a very slow computer, indeed. I’m often asked about the performance of laptops and why they seem so slow in comparison to desktop computers. Why Laptops Can Seem So Slow

Although laptops perform the same functions and for the most part run the same software that desktop computers do, they’re actually very different machines. The laptop computer probably has a processor that is one or perhaps two revisions behind its beefier desktop cousin. In addition, the processor is “underpowered” in terms of its clock speed.

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Do you want to learn how to increase computer speed and performance easily, quickly, and without any technical mumble jumble? Okay my friend, take 2 quick minutes out of your day and read on to discover the most effective and simplest way to get a fast PC right now!

You know, my business is primarily depended upon my computers. Therefore, I need them to be running as smooth as possible in order to complete my day-to-day tasks. Well, a little while ago both my laptop and desktop computers decided to take a vacation and they both ended up running terribly slow and getting errors every time you turned around!

I thought I knew about computers pretty well. Evidently that was not the case! I tried everything known to man to increase the speed of my computers. Here is what I did:

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