Suzy bought a new laptop today. After much deliberation she settled on a HP 6710S with a 1,86GHz CPU, 1GB in memory and 120GB hard disk drive for AU$1.400. My 5 year old laptop has a 1,7GHz CPU, 512MB in memory and a 60GB hdd and would cost perhaps AU$300 max. Presented like this it sounds like there is not a lot of difference between the two computers but there is.
It is getting ever more difficult the get a realistic picture of the diffreence between computers or their individual components. You can no longer simply compare numbers such as the ones mentioned before and make assumptions regarding the performance of the computer. The intricate details of your specifications will eventually reveal the performance potential of your system. But finding these details, comparing them to lower or higher speccs and other brands, or lower specs in one area and higher in others and then finally evaluating the price compared to the price of something else is now proving to be an arduous task.
The first thing you need to do is to evaluate the CPU power. When you look up the product on the website of its producer you will find lots of praise and lots of numbers. What you will not find is a performance ladder that will tell you what is the most powerfull CPU and how powerfull is the CPU you are looking at. The way I perform this task these days is to look at CPU Benchmark and find the CPU I am interested in. This performance test will include all parts of the users system so the results are not pure CPU power but the overall performance of several systems with that CPU.
That is good and bad. Good because you get a number that repersents overall power taking into account all that happens on a compuer. Bad because there are more factors detremining the end result than just the CPU speed. However, I think this page gives a good idea of what CPU is best and how much better it is than the one you are looking at. My old laptop scores 125pts on this chart, but Suzy’s new laptop should score 867pts. My work computer scores 425pts and our home desktop computer comes in at around 400pts, after I overclocked it.
This is a good approach to evaluating the brain of the computer you are looking at but what about all the other components and details? Computer reviews all seem to say the same thing about whatever laptop you are looking at and many articles will not show the time they were written, meaning that you may be reading rave reviews about 10 year old laptops that are now museum pieces. In conclusion it is getting ever harder to know what you are rally buying when shopping for computer stuff and there is little real information out there to help you make the choice.
