What's Slowing Down Your PC? It's the Hard Drive

There are lots of things that slow down PCs: bloatware, viruses, badly written applications.  One thing that does not slow down your PC most of the time: the CPU.  CPUs have become faster - much faster than hard drives - while at the same time we're doing more and more things that demand hard drive power - like synchronizing files and indexing them.

With the hard drive becoming the bottleneck, I'm sorely tempted by the growing popularity of SSD devices.  They can read and write several times faster than regular hard drives and they can handle the massive disk searches that go on with indexing, syncing, or anti-virus scans much more smoothly.  The result: a much faster PC.

You can try it out too at the Apple's stores.  If you look carefully, you can sometimes find a MacBook Air with a solid state drive.  Check it out, just launch every single program on the task bar at once.  It's amazingly fast.  So, despite the fact that my current MacBook is only 16 months old, I'm tempted by the new ones.  Let's see what Steve has to offer this morning.

Solid state drives for all?  Let's hope so!