What determines how fast your computer is

Palm-size computers that are more powerful than our best desktop machines will become commonplace; we can also expect that prices will continue to drop. A surprising statistic is that some 90 percent of the time, the newest desktop computers run in virtual 86 mode--that is, they are made to run as if they were ancient , eight-bit machines--despite all their fancy high-speed, bit buses and super color graphics capability.

This limitation occurs because most of the commercial software is still written for the architecture. Windows NT, Windows 95 and the like are the few attempts at utilizing PCs as bit, high-performance machines. Fiber-optics and light systems would make computers more immune to noise, but light travels at exactly the same speed as electromagnetic pulses on a wire.

There might be some benefit from capitalizing on phase velocities to increase the speed of data transfer and processing. Phase velocities can be much greater than the host carrier wave. Utilizing this phenomenon would open an entirely new technology that would employ very different devices and ways of transporting and processing data.

For more than40 years, electrical engineers and physicists have been working on the technologies of analog and digital optical computing, in which the information is primarily carried by photons rather than by electrons.

Optical computing could, in principle, result in much higher computer speeds. Much progress has been achieved, and optical signal processors have been successfully used for applications such as synthetic aperture radars, optical pattern recognition, optical image processing, fingerprint enhancement and optical spectrum analyzers. In the past two decades, however, a lot of effort has been expended on the development of digital optical processors.

Much work remains before digital optical computers will be widely available commercially, but the pace of research and development has increased in the s. Recent research has shown ways around this difficulty. Digital partitioning algorithms, which can break matrix-vector products into lower-accuracy subproducts, working in tandem with error-correction codes, can substantially improve the accuracy of optical computing operations.

Holographic data storage also offers a lot of promise for high-density optical data storage in future optical computers or for other applications, such as archival data storage. The promise of all-optical computing remains highly attractive, however, and the goal of developing optical computers continues to be a worthy one.

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Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Disk fragmentation occurs when information, such as a program or a document, is not stored in consecutive memory locations but instead is spread across many areas of a hard disk. This means the drive must jump to several random physical locations to assemble a single file, slowing execution.

Regularly defragmenting a hard drive can solve this problem. The software that is installed also can reduce computer speed. When a computer initially starts, certain programs and drivers are loaded into memory. Managing the amount of processes that are running at any given time, as well as other programs that might be in the background, can increase computer speed significantly and release valuable resources for other programs to use.

Eugene P. Please enter the following code:. If the computer has a slow bus, the processor has to wait longer for the instructions, which makes the computer run slower. QPI and HyperTransport allow for faster communication between the processor, RAM, hard drive, and other hardware, meaning a faster computer. Several components of a hard disk drive can make it slower or faster, which makes your computer run slower or faster overall.

For example, an HDD traditional hard drive makes a computer slower because of the moving parts inside it, which results in slower read and write times. However, an SSD solid-state drive has no moving parts, which results in faster read and write times. These types of video cards help with the performance of the computer by taking on the responsibilities of processing the 3D rendering and other complex tasks.

The more powerful the video card is, the faster it can render 3D graphics. The interface of a video card is also a contributing factor to the performance of the video card. In addition to the hardware that runs on your computer, having the latest operating system can have a significant impact on your overall computer's performance. As new technologies are introduced, for them to be fully supported by a computer, the operating system must also be written to interact with those new technologies.

Although today's operating systems release updates to support new technologies, older operating systems may not receive these updates. For example, a computer with Windows 10 runs faster than a computer with Windows XP because it supports all the latest hardware and is more optimized.

The software you're using can also affect the speed of a computer.