Author: Tien Shiah, Samsung Product Marketing Manager – SSD
Tien brings more than 15 years of product marketing experience from the semiconductor and storage industries. He has an MBA from McGill University and an Electrical Engineering degree from the University of British Columbia.
Effective Upgrades to Boost Performance
Let’s face it, every computer user complains about performance. It’s an unfortunate fact of life, but over time, computers become slower. New applications, filling hard drives with data, and changes to operating systems inevitably lead to slowdowns. That causes user frustration and reduces useful system life expectancy.
So what’s the best way to boost client performance? Basically, it’s making the right component choices up front when purchasing a system. Making good choices at time of purchase boosts user satisfaction and useful system life. But what are the best choices?
When buying a desktop or notebook, there are three main component choices that effect performance. These are the processor, the RAM, and the storage. Let’s explore each in turn.
Processor -- This upgrade is most useful for those doing processor-intensive tasks that make you wait—like image manipulation, video or audio encoding, CAD/CAM, or scientific computing. Today’s multi-core processors streamline multitasking, especially when these intensive processes are involved. Faster processors can also help boost gaming. But for general business productivity, email, web surfing, a processor upgrade won’t help very much. Modern processors have no problems running current operating systems or applications without being bogged down.
RAM -- While RAM is an easy upgrade you can make, PC systems are limited in how much memory they can support. Beyond a certain amount used by most applications, having extra RAM will not be as cost-effective as upgrading your storage to get improved performance.
Storage -- Upgrading to a solid state drive (SSD) is one of the best choices you can make in terms of general speed boosts. An SSD can speed up your boot time and the launching of applications, as well as boosting shutdown speeds.
Upgrading your storage offers application-specific benefits as well. For example, with widespread use of high-definition video capture devices (such as those found on smart phones), more people are editing video on their computers than ever before. The speed advantage SSDs have over HDDs is critical here. Users will experience better responsiveness and changes taking effect more quickly. SSDs minimize the amount of time video users spend waiting and maximizing time spent creating.
Video games also benefit tremendously from SSDs. Unlike word processors or spreadsheets, which need to only load themselves and a document, when video games are launched they need to load the engines that power them and the graphics to display to the user. Depending on the complexity of the game, this can take anywhere from a handful of seconds to a minute or more. New levels or missions then need to be loaded as play progresses – and the longer the delay experienced by the player, the less satisfying their gameplay experience is.
Another type of application that benefits from an SSD is anything that relies on a database to function, and one type of software with a database most users encounter are local mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook. For users who never delete their emails and have tens of thousands of messages stored locally, the SSD will cause Outlook to not only load itself faster, but make all the messages it contains available to view and act on more quickly as well.
To conclude, choosing an SSD such as one made by Samsung Semiconductor, the most widely recognized SSD manufacturer in the world, is likely to provide the best opportunity to enhance system performance. Popular SSD capacities offered for notebooks include 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB.
For more information about Samsung SSDs, please visit: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/product/flash-ssd/overview
For more information about Dell notebooks with SSDs, please visit: http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/04/sb360/samsung