CompuServe Messages

What you say is true, that is, a fast clock speed doesn't necessarily mean a fast system. To use (another) car analogy, a big engine doesn't necessarily make a fast car. BUT, sooner or later, if you put a big enough engine in, a car is going to be fast. It may handle like crap, but it will be fast. Witness the latest muscle pickup wars. I've found with PCs in particular that two factors make more "perceived" difference than the processor, however, and that's disk and display performance. A slow VGA card or older IDE drive will make a 66MHz 486 machine seem "slow" compared with a 33MHz 486 with snappy VGA card and either a newer IDE drive or SCSI. A lot of people get rid of an old PC when in fact by putting in an accelerated VGA card and a new hard disk (or SCSI card and drive) makes a BIG difference. The processor does help display and disk, but the underlying additional hardware is key. The processor is good obviously for computational things. Reflowing text in a high end wordprocessor or desktop publishing program, recalculating a spreadsheet, sorting and searching in a database (although again the disk plays a big part here), these are the tasks where a high speed processor helps. I've seen Word6 for Windows on a 66MHz 486 and a Pentium, and there's a noticable difference. The PCI video card I have in my Pentium machine at work is absolutely incredible. I thought the S3 adaptor I had in my last machine was amazing, but this is much faster. Display updates appear to be instantaneous. Good display and disk technology are the very things that have made the Amiga so great. The display was WAY ahead of PCs in raw performance a while ago, and having SCSI controllers with good DMA support is great. Anyway, food for thought…