When choosing a laptop, it is important to pay attention not only to the external characteristics - color, size, weight, but also to the technical parameters, which are not always obvious. There are several ways to find them out.
Laptop specifications
When buying a laptop or netbook, you should pay attention to a number of technical parameters that affect performance.
A processor (CPU) is the central part of any computer; the speed of the entire system depends on it to a greater extent. The main characteristics are clock speed and number of cores.
Random access memory (RAM), along with the processor, affects performance. The amount of memory, measured in gigabytes, is the main metric, but the clock speed is also important.
A graphics adapter or video card has its own processor (GPU) and memory. Graphics performance is especially important for gaming laptops. It consists of the volume and frequency of video memory, as well as the frequency of the GPU.
The Windows 7 and 8 operating systems provide a summary of system performance. It is called the performance index. The index can be accessed through the control panel, item "System".
A hard disk is a device for storing information. It also affects performance, albeit to a lesser extent. Important characteristics - interface (IDE, SATA, SAS) - the speed of data exchange depends on it, as well as the volume.
How to find out the characteristics
If the labels with the description of the goods, like the story of the consultant, do not inspire confidence, and there is no way to check the characteristics of the laptop on the manufacturer's Internet portal, simple commands will help you find out everything you need on the spot.
Microsoft's statistics show a 93% share of its operating systems, while other agencies (for example, ABI Research) give Microsoft 70% of the market. Thus, most of the OS pre-installed on laptops are part of the Windows family.
Laptops are usually sold with preinstalled operating systems. If we are talking about Windows, detailed information about the computer can be obtained by entering the msinfo32 command in the Run dialog box (the Win + R key combination is called).
The msinfo32.exe program collects detailed information about hardware - manufacturer, device IDs and their technical characteristics. Here you can also find out about the version of the operating system, drivers and services.
It is not uncommon to see laptops on sale with one of the GNU / Linux distributions. In this case, to obtain information about the system, you need to open a terminal - the command line interface and enter one of the following commands:
- lsb_release -a - will get the name and version of the distribution kit;
- cat / proc / cpuinfo - information about the processor;
- cat / proc / meminfo - information about physical and virtual memory;
- lshw - Displays hardware details.
