GHz

I know this is a stupid question.......but which is faster, a GHz with a higher or lower number?

 

well higher is always better but in modern cpu's is not really about ghz anymore

 

No, actually higher ghz is better. There are other factors as well, but higher ghz is always a good thing.

 

I was wondering cause my desk-top has a 3.00GHz Pentium 4, XP. My son bought a laptop with a 2. something but dual core etc. (I really am ignorant on this stuff). Anyway...his laptop is slow as crap. A friend told me it was because he was running wireless but I have friends that do also and theirs are NOT that freakin slow. But he is has Vista........?

 

the reduced speed could be caused by all the un-needed programs that are installed on the laptop when its first bought.

 

Also depending on certain hardware, it may just be theres not mature drivers for windows vista. One of my buddies did a test with the same machine with vista & xp and did bench marks for various games, and actually vista came out around 10-15% slower in most games, due to not have very mature drivers out yet. Give it a few months as drivers for vista are currently maturing at a very good rate. That might be some of the problems. Heres the Multi core wiki which talks about cores, and how to understand what duel core means. As far as wireless causing slowness its high unlikely that just cause he is using that it would cause slowness. Hope that helps.

 

Maybe a short explanation of GHz might help to understand what followed.

G = Giga-, or billions. (that's 1,000 millions if you're British)
Hz = Hertz, or cycles per second.​

A 3GHz processor is running at 3 billion cycles per second. The more cycles per second, the faster that processor runs, and the more work it can do. But as Colemanguy and Major Attitude pointed out, different processors running at the same speed can give wildly different results. Processor speed is only one of many factors that determine the effectiveness of a computer.