demystify laptop specs?

Question

how does the processor speed affect the overall efficiency of a laptop? which speed would be better at what? what does extreme low voltage has to do with the laptops performance? how does that vary from the installed memory RAM?

Answer 1

1. Processor speeds affect the power usage by consuming more energy to go faster. Many mobile processors have the ability to slow down when on battery to give you more mobile time.

2. Speeds are relative to what you plan to do with your laptop. If you want to run Vista and play games - spend as much as you can. 2Ghz would be a good start.

However, be realistic - if this is going to be your primary computer but you're going to use it for surfing, email, and homework - then you can save money on buying the fastest, and go with things that you'll actually use - like a larger hard drive or faster wireless.

3. Extreme low voltage is just a design of processor or other parts of a laptop designed to use as little power as possible. I wouldn't base your judgements on a purchase just for that feature... you'll be giving up a lot of speed to run on a little juice.

4. The more ram you have - the better. No doubt about it. Having a ton of ram will save you power in many ways by allowing your laptop to keep stuff "cached" in ram instead of reading and writing to the harddrive all the time. The hard drive and backlight are your two main energy users - so the less you use your hdd the longer your battery will last.

Answer 2

the processor speed does affect the overall efficiency of a laptop to some what extent (A good RAM capacity is recommended with a good processor speed is best for the best performance from a laptop). A decent speed would be 1.18GHz processor but the best would be 3GHz dual core processor these can do anything plus if you buy the 3GHz processor you don't need to upgrade annually. Extremely low voltage doesn't affect the laptops performance.