You are looking for the latest and greatest portable computer to replace your fi

Question

You are looking for the latest and greatest portable computer to replace your five-year-old laptop. You will use this computer for both work and personal computing tasks—everything from creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations to surfing the Web and editing videos of your friends and family. You want a computer that is powerful, lightweight, and comes with a long battery life.

1. Should you purchase a computer with an x86 processor, an Intel Atom processor, or an ARM processor? What are the pros and cons of each type of processor? Will you want a multicore processor? Why or why not?

2. What sort of main memory and cache memory should you seek?

Critical Thinking Questions

1. What sort of secondary storage devices would most economically meet your needs?

2. Which input and output devices would be most useful to you?

Explanation / Answer

1) All three processors will serve the purpose.

But x86 is more expensive than ARM or Atom because it is faster compared to the other two.

As far as multicore is concerned, it will be useful for computationally expensive tasks such as video playback, net surfing and is not much relevant for standard office operations. So the decision is based on potential task mix.

Memory size will matter in this scenario and a memory size of teh order of 1 GB should suffice.

Cache size should be greater than or equal to 32 MB

2) Secondary storage device : SSD Drive, Hard drive ( 1 TB)

Input devices : Keyboard, Mouse

Output device : Monitor, Printer

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