The subject of the meeting was 'Upgrading your PC'. Now some people might consider the concept to be something of an oxymoron, but the idea was to focus on hardware changes that people can easily make to their PC to increase the performance or otherwise extend its useful life. We looked at memory, hard disks and CPUs. As a practical workshop we had an old Toshiba Satellite notebook with just 32 MB of memory and a 2 GB hard disk and we showed how to replace the memory and the hard disk.
Acknowledgements to 'The PC Guide' for parts of the text in this summary
So, first off, what are the signs that perhaps you might need to consider upgrading your computer? A somewhat light hearted summary might go like this:
First of all you have to decide whether an upgrade is even the right way to go. If, after your investigations, you find that even after upgrading you will still not have a computer that matches what you need or want, then perhaps a new system may be in order. On the other hand, if an upgrade can give you a worthwhile improvement in computing performance and a feeling of peace and harmony when considering matters of a financial nature, then that may well be the way to go. And the first thing to be done in order to conduct the aforementioned evaluation is to find out:
The easiest way to go about finding what you have got is to connect to the internet and head off to www.belarc.com. Click on downloads and install the Belarc Adviser. this will then analyse your machine and give a summary of installed hardware and software.
The system memory is the place where the computer holds current programs and data that are in use. The term "memory" is somewhat ambiguous; it can refer to many different parts of the PC because there are so many different kinds of memory that a PC uses. However, when used by itself, "memory" usually refers to the main system memory, which holds the instructions that the processor executes and the data that those instructions work with. Your system memory is an important part of the main processing subsystem of the PC, tied in with the processor, cache, motherboard and chipset. Memory plays a significant role in the following important aspects of your computer system:
Maybe the easiest upgrade to do, possibly the one that will give the most immediate benefit. Main points to note are:
Potential problems that you may have with regard to memory upgrades are:
It is true that for many aspects of computing, the hard disk's performance level is not much of an issue. If you are recalculating a massive spreadsheet, or doing complex rendering of 3D objects, the amount of sheer processing power in the system is of paramount concern; the hard disk will only come into play periodically. However, these sorts of specialty operations are not indicative of how most of us use our PCs. Typical PC use involves loading programs, and loading and saving data frequently. All of these operations require access to the hard disk. And therefore, hard disk performance becomes an issue constantly as we use our machines.
The importance of hard disk performance even goes beyond this however. After all, we also use all the other main components of our system constantly, so aren't they equally important to the performance equation? Well, yes and no. The importance of the CPU, motherboard and other core components is very important. But much as the strength of a chain is equal only to that of its weakest link, in many ways the performance of a system is only equal to that of its poorest-performing component. Compared to the solid state components in a PC, hard disks have by far the worst performance. And even as hard disks improve in speed, CPUs, video cards and motherboards improve in speed even faster, widening the gap. Thus, hard disks continue to constrain the overall performance of many systems.
In the amount of time it takes to perform one random hard disk access, one of today's CPUs can execute over a million instructions! Making the CPU fast enough to process two million instructions while it waits doesn't really gain you much unless it has something to do with that time. Only improving the hard disk's speed to reduce the wait time will get you where you want to go. Any time you see your hard disk's activity light flashing, the odds are that the rest of the system is twiddling its thumbs waiting for those slow mechanical components to "do their thing".
The applications where hard disk performance issues are most important are obviously those that do a lot of reading and writing to the hard disk, instead of doing a lot of processing. Such tasks are said to be "I/O bound", where "I/O" stands for "input/output". These tasks are contrasted to those which use the CPU a great deal and are called (unsurprisingly) "CPU bound". Multimedia editing applications, especially those dealing with large audio and video files, are probably the ones most affected by the speed of the storage subsystem. Also up there are applications that process files, including compilers and many disk utilities. Initially starting your PC is also a very I/O-intensive application, as the operating system loads literally hundreds of files. Improving hard disk performance can shave time off the boot process in a very palpable way.
The need for improved performance is a major driving factor behind the rise in popularity of RAID.
Of course, as well as speed, capacity is an important issue. In fact, maybe the most important issue for most people to consider an upgrade.
When considering an upgrade to the Hard disk, consideration should be given to:
Desired storage capacity: Self explanatory, really. Is bigger better? Depends how much you need. But maybe two smaller disks instead of one big one will give better performance with the right interface.
External performance factors: Today's IDE/ATA hard disks are designed to operate with an interface speed of 100 MB/s, but their sustained transfer rates are barely pushing 40 MB/s. This means the 100 MB/s speed only applies for the occasional transfer that does not require actual access to the hard disk platters.
There is one area where the interface speed is very important to pay attention to: you do not want it to be too low or performance will suffer. If the interface does not have enough speed to allow the hard disk to run at its full sustained transfer rate, then performance can be substantially degraded. Since interfaces are relatively inexpensive this is a situation you generally want to avoid: instead, upgrade the interface. This issue occurs only when putting a new, fast drive into a rather old, slow system.
Internal performance factors: It is possible to go into a great deal of detail on internal performance factors. However the main things to consider is the access time.
It is important to remember that the processor is not the only component in the system that determines overall system performance. It is an important one, but it isn't the only one. Many hardware companies like to overstate the value of the processor's performance (sometimes focusing just on the clock speed). For example, you'll see claims that a system running with a Pentium 150 is "50% faster" than one with a Pentium 100. Or a retailer will try to sell you a 120 MHz Pentium OverDrive for your Pentium 60 system with claims that it will "double performance". These claims are, in almost every case, totally untrue. In fact, they are usually nowhere close to being true.
The reason is that speeding up the processor only improves system performance for those aspects of system use that depend on the processor. In most systems, the processor is already fast enough, but it is other parts of the system--the memory, system buses, hard disk and video card especially--that are the "bottlenecks" to system performance. Since most processors are already much faster than the devices that support them, they spend a great deal of time waiting around for data that they can use. Putting a still faster processor in place of the current one will not yield a very large performance increase if this is the case, because the faster processor will just spend more time waiting.
One of the most important factors that influences overall system performance is memory bus speed. The availability of Pentium PCs with both 60 and 66 MHz system bus speeds has emphasized this. Since the processors on these machines are so fast, they end up waiting a great deal on data from the memory bus. As a result, a slower processor running on a 66 MHz system bus can provide comparable performance to a faster one on a 60 MHz bus.
The classical example here is the Pentium 133, which provides performance virtually identical to the Pentium 150 in most cases. In fact, the Pentium 150 scores below the Pentium 133 in some benchmarks. Another way to look at this: setting a Pentium 100 to run with a memory bus speed of 50 MHz and a clock multiplier of 2 will result in a significant decrease in system (not processor) speed compared to its normal setting of 66 MHz and clock multiplier of 1.5, even though in both cases the CPU is running at 100 MHz. (of course, for most people, this speed of processor is now history, but it illustrates the argument)
The faster processors get, the more this phenomenon is observed. This is sort of a law of diminishing returns in processor speed. When you get to very high clock speeds, the improvement in overall system performance is minimal even if the processor's performance increases a great deal. The classic example is the Pentium 200, which by most benchmarks provides less than 10% system performance improvement over the Pentium 166, despite having 20% higher benchmarks when looking just at the processor.
So, as with other parts of the PC, it is not realistic to consider the CPU in isolation from the system. However, if your CPU seems well behind the current specification standard, if your software requirements suggest that you need a faster processor and the rest of your system is fast enough to justify it, a processor upgrade may well be worthwhile. There are several problems which may be encountered when thinking of upgrading a CPU:
However, if all else is equal, and it is just a question of replacing an ABC123 600MHz processor with an ABC123 800 MHz processor, then, if other parts of the system are not causing bottlenecks and the applications being run would benefit from greater processor speed, then it can be a relatively straightforward and worthwhile upgrade.
Well, chat is fine, but of course, it is daft to talk about something and not even know what it looks like. And anyway, maybe I was making it all up, so why should anyone believe it? So, to demonstrate sincerity or was it because I ran out of stuff to say, one or the other, a Toshiba Satellite notebook was taken to pieces to a sufficient extent to demonstrate how to replace a memory card and how to replace a hard disk drive. We did not have suitable memory card, but we tried one from another Toshiba satellite to show what happens with the wrong memory installed. It doesn't work, that is all. Installing a memory card is quite easy and the Belarc programme will usually tell you how many free memory slots are available. Notebooks usually have some permanent 'on board' memory whilst desk tops do not. For the particular notebook that we looked at, memory was obtained at a later date from www.crucial.com. Using the selection system on their web site, it is quite easy to find the model of computer for which memory is needed and thus to be confident that the correct memory is purchased.
Whilst it is almost always relatively straightforward to update memory on a notebook computer, the hard disk drive is another matter. Some are very easy, a piece of cake, in fact. Others, on the other hand, require that the notebook be 50% dismantled before access can be gained to the hard disk. It was interesting to compare a later version of a Toshiba notebook, where access to the hdd was quite difficult, to the earlier model, which was very easy. Some kind of progress, perhaps - I think not. Well, on our demonstration notebook, we replaced the 2 GB hdd with a 15 GB jobby. Everything fine and dandy apart from coming up against the 8 GB limit, which meant that we could only 'see' 8 GB of the new disk. This is a BIOS limitation which is often encountered on older machines. We downloaded a BIOS upgrade patch from the Toshiba site, but that did not sort it out. Hence we decided to deal with the matter by using drive overlay software. This software resides in the master boot record and gives the facility to use large disk drives even on computers which have a BIOS that does not support them. If our machine had been a desktop, we could alternatively have used a card from www.promise.com. Such a card has its own BIOS and enables use of a large hard drive in older computers without having to put up with the idiosyncrasies of drive overlay software.
So, if you weren't there, you missed: