How much memory does he need?

[Switchy]

A friend is buying a laptop running Vista.

How much memory does he need, 1 GHz or 2 GHz?

The laptop is being used for digital photography, music, internet.

 

Thanks

 

Switchy:shrug:

 

Edit : whoops, I meant to say 1GB or 2 GB

[Queso]

1ghz is good 2 ghz is better

[Zythryn]

Is he storing digitial photos or editing them as well.

If editing photos or video I would definately get 2Gb.

[CraigD]

How much memory does he need, 1 GHz or 2 GHz?

Gigahertz (GHz) are a unit of frequency equal to 1 billion ([math]10^9[/math]) cycle per second. They’re not used to measure the amount of memory or disk storage available to a computer, but to measure the clock speed of a computer’s CPU and other components that perform some fairly constant number of “compute cycles” per interval of time. A typical new PC these days has its CPU “clocking” at about 2 GHz, while it can access its memory anywhere from a tenth to a half as many times in a second.

 

Storage is usually measured in units such as gigabytes (GB), a numeric prefix equaling anything from [math]8 \time 10^9[/math] binary (1 or 0) bits to [math]8 \times 2^{30} = 8 \times 1,073,741,824[/math] bits (technically this later unit should be called a gibibyte, abbreviated GiB – see 11980 for some hypography on the subject). A typical new PC these days has at least 1 GB or memory, and will have at least a couple hundred GB to over a terabyte (TB), which equals from 1000 to 1024 GB (and technically should be called a tebibyte, abbreviated TiB, and equal to 1024 GiB).

 

You can’t have too much of either clock speed (GHz) or memory (GB). Though Microsoft recommends a minimum clock speed of 1 GHz and memory of 512 MB (1 GB = 1000 to 1025 MB), most people suggest at least a clock speed of 2 GHz and memory of 2 GB.

 

In terms of practical performance, memory access (“bus”) speed and disk access speed are usually more important than CPU speed, and an specification that discount retailers often skimp on to sell substandard performance machines, so watch out for machines that don’t provide this data up front, make sure you get it before buying (or at least insist on “test driving” a new machine in by launching and using whatever applications, such as a browser, you care about performing well).

[GAHD]

LMAO ok

GHZ and GB are 2 different things. -either way if he's doing any gaming more of both is better.

 

going into al ittle more detail there are a few hertz values you want to have as high as possible in your budjet:

-The ram, so that it can store and retreive the data for the stuff you're doing at the moment as fast as possible,

-the CPU, so that it can do the data-crunching as fast as possible

-the front side bus is often overlooked, but is sometimes particularly limiting to system performance.

 

In he case of 'GB' (or MB for that matter) in memory allways try to get the most you can in your budjet. You also have to worry about a decent sized hard drive, and further to get high RPM drive so you can get that data in& out fast. The hard drive is secondary to your RAM in day to day performance, but you'll find they fill up pritty fast.

 

 

for game performance the highest priority is a dedicated memory videocard, rather than a shared memory videocard. For any real time rendering, shared memory is bad.

 

for everything else, including flying the space shuttle, you could squeek by with an older rig that'd run about $300-$600.

[Queso]

oops, yeah whatever I was tired.

[TheFaithfulStone]

Personally, I can't imagine why you'd ever need more than 640K.

 

:Glasses:

 

TFS

[alexander]

if you are running Vista, you want as much RAM as possible, why? vista takes up 411megs on boot, and that is not running anything, so you add office, and its already over 700 megs of RAM, + IE + Photoshop or CAD and you are waay over a Gig!