Personal computing: When there's a need for speed

摘要

On the one hand, speed is not always what it is cracked up to be; on the other, speed is sometimes given short shrift. Understanding the differences can help you make smart PC-buying decisions and smart Web site design decisions. In practical terms, very few people today need the very fastest PCs, those that run the Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz CPUs, which have recently reached the market, or the equivalent chips from AMD' or Motorola. For common tasks such as word processing, spreadsheets, business graphics, Web surfing, and e-mail, slower and less expensive central processing units are more than adequate. On the whole, the importance of CPU speed is overrated, the single most overrated aspect of personal computing today. The single most underrated speed element today is the time it takes Web pages to load. What is not as widely known is that even with high-speed access, slowloading Web pages can still be a problem.