Know some of the factors that impact on a computer’s performance

Other factors
CPU
  • As described in the Speed and Capacity sections, there are many factors which impact on the performance of a computer. The speed and type of CPU is among the most important, however there are many more factors which affect it, but none more so than the application you are running.
    RAM
  • There would be no point in having a high end 3D graphics card with a huge amount of video RAM when all you need to display on your screen is Microsoft Word. The extra expense of such a peripheral would be unjustifiable as the computer would not utilise the specific performance gains offered by the card
RAM
  • The amount of RAM you have in your computer greatly affects the speed at which it can run. Repetitive tasks are often held in RAM so they can be fetched quicker than from the hard disk. If there are more tasks for your computer to do than the RAM can store, the computer has to wait for these tasks to be fetched off the hard disk — which although very fast, is nowhere near as fast as RAM.