Their new machine was "built" by someone else and sold second hand so they had no idea what was inside. It turned out that they had some bottlenecks that caused their system to underperform.
In this series, we shall look at the various bottlenecks that can occur in your system and what you can do about it - without having to rush out and buy that new 400Mhz monster!
Understanding the Problem
It's all very well thinking that because you have a fast processor that your machine will fly like the wind. It won't if your other components hold it back and this happens in every system to some extent. These bottlenecks generally occur where something physical occurs - a disk head searching for data, the firing of photons to illuminate your screen, the printer feeding paper through - all these areas are potential bottlenecks.
There are others, too, which are not so obvious. Let's take a simple look at what happens when you run your word processor, for example.
Here's what generally happens (in very simple terms).
You double click the word processor icon ... the system finds out the file that the short cut points to ... it begins to load the word processor from disk ... the splash screen is read ... screen memory is loaded with the splash screen ... splash screen displayed ... meanwhile the rest of the program is read from disk ... the system allocates a chunk of memory that the program is allocated ... this memory is "filled" with the program ... the initial "blank" page is prepared ... it is loaded into screen memory ... it is then displayed along with the rest of the screen (toolbars, menus etc) ... the intro sound is loaded into memory ... the system sends the sound to the soundcard ... the soundcard proceeds to convert the digital signal to analogue and is then sent to the speakers ... additional memory is cleared ready to store the newly typed document.
All that and you haven't typed a single word!
As you can see, quite a lot is going on while your word processor (or any program for that matter) is being loaded and, along the way, bottlenecks can occur.
