Megahertz, gigabytes and 56k

[justjeni]

My dad is seriously thinking of getting a computer and was asking me about these three things. He's got a mind for details - while I sort of understand the basics, I couldn't answer all his questions. How do these three factors affect the speed of your computer? For instance, he is talking about one with a pentium 4 processor and 800+ megahertz and some gigabytes - can't remember the number there, and a 56K modem. The pentium thing really confused me - I think I asked compaq once what mine was and they said a pentium three - does that sound right?
Well, I'll stop there - I thought I had a basic understanding of this but dear dad has me totally confused now..

[Wabanaki Web]

Pentium 4 is the newest chip. It would also be the fastest, the megahertz also refers to the pentium chip, not sure what it means but the higher the number the better. I'll give you an example, I have a Pentium II with 450Mhz. It's a slow computer by most people's standards but ok for me. To really juice up your computer pay attention to how much RAM it comes with, or buy more. Mine has only 32MB, you would want at least double that, and I bet most here have 128MB. The gigabytes your dad is talking about is the hard drive. That is storage space for all your files, if you plan on running alot of programs or using it for files that are really large, like graphics or sound files then you will need alot of room. Mine is 8.something gig and I am only using 1.2 gig of space. I delete alot of stuff out of habit, before this piece o' junk, I had a REAL piece o' ---- with, get this, a 25MB hard drive. You heard right, it was one of those old 486 versions (that is a really really old pentium), with 8MB RAM. It was a very sad excuse for a computer! Anyway, with only 25MB to save files, I had to get in the habit of deleting anything unnecessary from my computer, and I still do it now.

[justjeni]

I'm going to print that and show my dad - thank you so much! You helped me out, too - more than you may realize!

[huythuy]

You must figure out what kind of work you will do ,

I'm use PIII 733 133Hz with 192M ECC Ram and 100Hz 15Gb harddisk . My work is design web , graphic , generally one image about 40Mb , it runs smooth and seem not slower than 800 but can save you a hundred from 800 and hundreds from P4 .

You can test one PC to know how it runs with Sisoft Sandra 2001 , it'll show you many precous infos