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Notebook Computer Guide*

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Notebook Computer Terms

... Clock Speed

This is the speed of microprocessors and is measured in MHz.

MHz is short for megahertz. One MHz equals one million cycles per second. The speed of processors, usually known as clock speed, is measured in megahertz (MHz) or these days in gigahertz (GHz).

The higher the clock speed, the faster the computer will process applications and data. It determines how powerful your notebook computer will be.

Of course, in early computers and laptops, we only had a single system clock with the expansion bus and CPU running at the same speed. This caused problems as the CPU developed much faster speeds than the bus and you had a real bottleneck. Not a good thing since data could not be passed efficiently to other devices where it was needed.

One obvious solution, was to give the expansion bus it's own clock (more or less) - the motherboard can use different circuits/technology to split the clock signal or multiply it to handle the demands of all the components in your computer or laptop.

In modern computers, we have clocks for the video, expansion bus, system bus and so on. All these components can run asynchronous or independently with their own clock speeds.

To find out more about ClockSpeed - just view this short YouTube video: