Will Carbon Nanotube Chips Speed Up Our Computers?

GA! tmctech, It would be nice to have less baggage running. Right now on my system there 41-43 items running depending on McAfee is scanning or running other apps.

McAfee at times will hang Firefox. Then I have to close it then reopen it to get it working. The reset can take up to 7-10mins just to get back to where I was. Yes I have tweak settings.

But until I upgrade this computer I've learned a few tricks. One is to set McAfee to background mode as soon as a scan starts helps.

Anyway, I'm toying with Linux.....

Right now, the single biggest bottleneck in computer performance is the mechanical hard drive. Granted, these things are fairly inexpensive and the capacities are becoming awe-inspiring (I still remember when 350 megs was a big, roomy drive). But, they are slow, compared to the rest of the electronics. Solid state drives are anywhere from one to several orders of magnitude faster. I've heard stories of computers with SSDs that boot up in 5 seconds or less. Unfortunately, SSDs are costly as yet, several times the cost of a mechanical drive per gig.

Until solid state storage becomes ubiquitous and a heck of a lot less expensive, the limits of silicon will be hard to reach. Of course, for ultra-high-end workstations and supercomputers, that is a somewhat different matter, as these things can never really be fast enough, can they?