Connecticut's IT Managed Services Blog

Upgrading your computer

Everyone likes upgrading their PC because it means they can now use a faster computer with more features, but it’s also a great way to save money on electricity costs while going green. As technology advances so does the techniques used to save power. Anyone who had a laptop a decade ago remembers the problems with heat, size and horrible battery life. Nowadays these problems are barely a concern with laptop battery life being at minimal 3-4 hours, but generally can go up to 10 hours or beyond. New breakthroughs in battery technology have helped, but it has been the tech industry as a whole that has increased battery life. As new CPUs and Memory chips are being created, one of the main goals is to make sure the next generation runs faster, but also uses less electricity and generates less heat. This is done through new techniques created to create smaller transistors, which allows more to be placed on a single chip, and less electricity to be needed to use them. This combined with new features that keep energy consumption in mind have allows computers to lower their speeds when idle to decrease and consume less power, but can increase speed again when needed.

Most people have hear d the term RAM used before among computer users although many don’t know what exactly it is or does, they know that having more is probably useful to them. RAM literally stands for Random Access Memory and is used to fix the problem of reading data from Spinning Drives. Your computer writes/reads data from the hard drive but because traditional hard drives are spinning mechanical devices, it has the problem of being slow, so slow that the rest of the computer has to wait for the hard drive to finish before moving on to its next task. This creates a “bottleneck,” which is simply the slowest part of the computer, which forces the rest of the computer to slow down to that pace. Because hard drives could only go so fast they formed a way to get around this, RAM. What the RAM does is store files temporality on the chip, these files are ones that the OS needs to access constantly or needs quick access to at any given moment. By having this split between the Hard drive and RAM you create a place to store files permanently and another to store ones you need to access quickly, these files tend to be programs that are currently open, which is why it takes so long to load the program the first time, but only a few seconds to gain access to it after its loaded.

With an entire department dedicated to IT Consulting for the small to medium businesses space, we are often asked about the future and impact of smart phones. The Mobile world is changing, and fast. If you remember the big boom for computers in the 90's then be prepared for something similar to happen in the Mobile world as phones are becoming powerful enough to replace desktops and laptops for many tasks. But this time around the major technology companies aren't guessing on what strategies will work, they've learned from their past mistakes. So what’s going to happen and who will be the next major tech players in this upcoming generation?

Nobody can be certain on who is going to dominate the mobile world, for the longest time it seemed like Apple was the only company with a real plan, but as 2011 is starting to gear up, all the major mobile companies are showing that they are ready to compete. If we were to look at the current landscape I would say there a few names to look out for; Microsoft with Windows Mobile 7, Google with Android, Apple with iOS, HP with palm's WebOS and finally RIM with Blackberry OS. There is one more, Nokia, but they are a currently going through major structural changes, switching from their own Symbian OS to Microsoft's Windows Mobile 7 so for now we won't consider them. All these companies are hoping to become THE mobile OS provider, just as Microsoft was THE desktop OS with Windows. At this point it is good to look at each and see where they are going and how this is can affect the future.