Quick analogy – Computer to physical world.

Your bookcase is the hard drive. You can fill up the hard drive and it will not hinder performance in almost any capacity. Even when you search for your files, it only searches your libraries. i.e. you’re My Documents folder and maybe your desktop. Only when you scan the entire hard drive like for a virus or malware, does a cluttered hard drive cause performance issues. Cancel the scan and you are back to optimum performance. Whether it’s a smaller or larger the bookshelf, there is a zero performance change for day to day operations. Whether the bookshelf is near empty (lots of free space) or nearly full (less than 5% free space left), there is a zero performance change for day to day operations.

Your desk space is RAM. When you take a book off the shelf (open a program), you load a copy of it into RAM. Adding more RAM will not speed up your computer. You need about 1 to 1.5GB for the operating system and hardware device drivers. You need about .5GB for most applications and 2GB for a super power user running 35 applications, non-AutoCAD/Video/Picture high-end applications. i.e. If you run Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, Adobe Acrobat, MSPaint, Notepad, Publisher, and Access you are still above typical and only require 2GB of RAM in addition to the base of 1.5GB. i.e. super power users need 3.5GB normally. If you had 8GB of RAM in that scenario, you are actually slowing the computer down because you are refreshing RAM you are not even using. When you close an application, you are simply removing it from the desk space. You are not putting the book back on the shelf because you were only using a copy anyway.

Your brain is the processor. It’s how fast you can open the program and ask for things to get done. For a typical user you are not requesting too much brain-power. Even if you had 25 programs running at the same time, technically your are only using one application, the one you are looking at. Only if you have background things happening like Browsers left open that get advertisements in the webpage that revolve through different ads. Another background example is listening to music or watching a streaming video while working. Still, the CPU usage of that video is 5% regular viewing and 7% CPU at full screen. If you are waiting for anything, your processor was not fast enough and nothing else. It’s only when you are running a large report that during the process of asking for the report, then entire computer nearly shuts down with the CPU at 80%+. Click anything during a request and you are sure to get a “Not Responding”. It’s not crashed, it’s busy doing what you asked and the Operating System is telling you I am not taking your new request in this application because it’s already busy. “Not Responding” is a busy signal. If you pester it too much then you can lose control of the computer and have to force the computer off. Leave it alone. If you “End Task” on anything you are creating new problems you will pay for down the road. Sometimes you have to “End Task”. Patience is the better solution. A faster processor is the real solution if patience is not an option. You cannot upgrade your processor pretty much after purchasing it. The class of processor during the purchase is simplified here. I can buy a low-end processor 1, 1.25, or 1.5 (this is a made-up number to show you simplicity) If I buy the “1” processor, years down the road, I can upgrade to the 1.5 as a max. That’s not an upgrade. I could have bought the mid-range processor 2, 2.25, or 2.5 at that same time frame. Again, if I bought the 2.25 processor, the max I can upgrade to is 2.5. Not that drastic of an upgrade. The high-end processor choices are 3, 3.25, or 3.5. Now, here is the misconception. If I bought the low-end processor a few years or even a week ago, I cannot upgrade to the 2 or 3 series class processor. Game over. Also, if you bought your 1 series class processor two years ago, the 1 series class of processor today is already 4 times faster than the one you bought and will not work in that two year old computer. Find out your speed rating at cpubenchmark.net. Look for the speed rating to be in the range of 1,000 to 10,000.