Hello and welcome to the Lesson six of our free computer repair and general training program. Today, we’re going to be taking a look at breaking down the features of a processor. There are two main numbers that we’re most familiar with processors. There’s megahertz and bus speed. In understanding them, I typically use a highway or a car example because a lot of people are familiar with that. In the lesson, I more specifically explained what it is. Bus speed; imagine a road or a highway and you have megahertz and bus speed. Megahertz is like how fast the cars can travel on that road. While bus speed would best be described as how many lanes has the highway?

So, if bus speed refers to how much data can move across a bus at one time and then megahertz is like at what speed. So that’s why let’s say a 3.0 megahertz processor with a lower bus speed might not perform as well as a 2.4 with a higher bus speed. They both matter.

Next we talk a little bit about cores. Now we’re into this Dual Core, Core 2, Quad Core. Basically the simplest term of having two cores is like having two processors. The last computer I bought was I think, three gigahertz Pentium 4. That was probably about three or four years ago. I just bought a new laptop which is where I’m doing this video on and I think this is a 2.4 gigahertz but it’s a dual core. So essentially it’s like having two 2.4‑gigahertz processors.

As we jump up to Quad Core, it can get very expensive. So budgetary restraints do not always allow us to get the best in processors but in general terms, Dual Core is better than Core two and Quad Core is better than all of them. For most people, you never really notice the difference, unless you are someone who does a lot of video or gaming, anything that’s processor‑intensive.

So, Lesson six is just a little bit about understanding the processor. You’ve got your megahertz, your bus speed and then your cores. There are also things like cache. When you’re looking at a processor, it will have something like L1, L2 or L3 cache. Each cache is responsible for something. Specifically, it doesn’t really matter. One is for other instruction. One is for data. One is for translation. The rule of thumb is the bigger cache you have, the better. But most processors, there’s really not a lot of variety in cache. You kind of just get what you get.

So if you have any questions about processors, make sure you hit the forum link below here and sign into the forum, introduce yourself, start asking questions. The forum’s been great, giving lots and lots and lots of helpful tips and new moderators that make sure we get to people’s questions answered quickly. That’s the end of Lesson six and we look forward to seeing you on Lesson 7.