Dust Your PC - Part 1

Processor - CPU
Memory - RAM
Hard Drive
The way these parts interact is important to understanding how a computer works, & ultimately to understanding why you require RAM for your programs. Around the Web & in Magazines you can find recommended RAM amounts for typical users. You also will find lots of places proclaiming RAM as the best performance for your dollar upgrade. I don't disagree at all, but I require you to understand what RAM actually does, & why it can be such a valuable upgrade.
The article is divided in to sections, covering:
1. The functions of the three components we are discussing and their relative speeds
2. Why you need RAM and what takes up RAM
3. Multitasking and how RAM improves performance
4. How much RAM you need
In the event you are editing a picture, the CPU will first look in RAM memory to see if it is there, because RAM is speedy. If it is not, the CPU will go to the hard drive & edit the picture there. Because your hard drive is so slow, this takes a much longer time than if the picture had been in RAM.

Again, the CPU only stores a little miniscule little miniscule tiny little bit of knowledge, so it is to get it from somewhere to operate on. If the CPU has knowledge to method, it will do so as speedy as it can, but if it doesn't, the brain of your computer fundamentally sits & waits doing nothing. Only after it finds & retrieves the knowledge it needs can it method it.

So ideally, you require your CPU to find knowledge in the quickest place feasible. As you can see, if the knowledge is in RAM you are much better off than if it is in your hard disk because RAM is a lot faster. take a glance at the graph below. It shows the time it takes to access each memory type in nanoseconds.

Clearly, your hard drive is slow, but when you look at the above graph, & you see the numbers it is based on below, you recognize how slow it is. Each is an approximate access time in nanoseconds:
CPU 1 ns

RAM 60 ns

Hard Drive 10,000,000 ns

It ought to be clear why the bars for your CPU & RAM do not even show up on this graph, your hard drive is fundamentally slow.

My father always told me to dust, but I never did, mostly because I was one time lazy, but also because I could not find any tangible benefit to dusting. I didn't see how I'd benefit from my room or my things being less dusty. Well now I have gotten a bit older, and I finally found a reason to dust - a cooler walking computer. I'll give some background alone system and circumstances first, then run tests before and after dusting, as well as document how and what I used to dust. Be sure to take a glance at this editorial - with pics and graphs - and a whole lot more, at aworldofhelp.com.

I have had the computer in query for a small over years, a dual AMD Athlon MP workstation that while no longer the top of the line, is still plenty speedy for what I do. The computer is walking at standard speeds and specifications, and has always been stable - but not 100%. When the system was about a year elderly I had been getting by with the occasional, roughly time every week lock up. At that point, I finally spent the time to try and diagnose the issue.

To be perfectly clear, I am speaking about a lock up, where everything stops responding, the screen freezes and I must reboot, not fundamentally an application crash, which I can usually blame on Microsoft. My preliminary thought was that the computer was overheating, specifically the CPUs. I was one time a small hesitant though because I was one time walking AMD retail processors at standard specifications with AMD retail heatsinks and fans, and I figured that ought to have been a fine setup. But I have had CPUs overheat before when I was one time sure that was the issue and this felt like it now. I did some research online and it looked like the AMD cooling solutions were underwhelming performers, so I broke down and bought new heatsinks and fans. These still weren't top of the line, but they reduced my CPU temperatures immediately by about 20%.

In unscientific testing I'd say my computer was absolutely more stable after the reduction in temperature. I estimate the every week lockup became an every month or even every other every month lockup. This clearly is not ideal for a system that ought to be 99.99% stable, but it was an immense improvement, and I let the issue go for some time. I will note that as plenty of you tons of assume, this computer is always on, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Anyway now it is another year later and my computer is increasingly unstable again. I am not going to go out and get better heatsinks and fans again, as I am sure the improvement would be less than before. My next though was about how dusty the whole system is. I do know I ought to have dusted it time in the last years, but I never found time for it. I'd say I live in average surroundings in terms of dustiness, not better or worse, and I never thought it would make a significant difference in my CPU temperature. As you'll see, I was one time wrong - which incidentally might make my father right.

all users ought to think about the results of both tests, possibly giving more weight to the most closely matches your typical computing. Even in the event you run predominantly business applications, you'll definitely occasionally does something that falls under this content creation check, editing pics or an occasional home film, for example. So think about all the tests, don't focus on graph.