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The hard drive is where all your programs, drivers and other applications are stored, and also where you usually save every thing you create on your computer, unless you use an external hard drives. It is non volatile, meaning that it does not need power to keep all the information there, unlike RAM. The more GB your hard drive has, then the more it is able to store, but that does not mean that it is faster. The speed of the hard drive, or how fast the information can be retrieved, depends on the revolutions per minute or rpm, which indicates how fast the hard drive spins. Most laptop hard drives have an rpm of fifty four hundred, but you can upgrade to seventy two hundred. The cons of a faster hard drive are that it generates more heat and will drain your battery faster, so take that into consideration when configuring your laptop. An example of this is the 160GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM). This hard drive can store 160GB of data. The SATA is the name of the interface, the means by which information travels between the hard drive and the mother board, and it spins at 5400 revolutions per minute. You would think a hard drive with more capacity is faster, but it is actually just the opposite. Some times you will see laptops with dual hard drives and a dual hard drive is faster than a single one. Recently, solid state hard drives have started to appear, and the larger ones are a great choice if your budget allows it. The 128GB is currently the largest solid state hard drive available. Since they do not spin like traditional hard drives, they are quiet and they do not get hot. They will not drain the battery as fast and are much better at handling shakes and bumps. You do not need to spend a lot of money on upgrading to a huge hard drive, just make sure you have enough space for your operating system, programs, files, etc. It is very easy and relatively inexpensive, to add external hard drives. The graphics card produces every thing you see on your screen, from plain text to complex 3D graphics. The card comes either integrated, meaning it is soldered to the mother board or separate discreet. The integrated card shares memory with the CPU, which really slows things down if you do any on-line gaming, or work on music or video. Another down side is that you can not change an integrated card if you decide to upgrade. The discreet card has its own RAM and version of a CPU, the GPU, so working on complex image production will not affect the speed and performance of the rest of your computer. The speed of the card is determined by its band width, which is how fast information travels between the GPU and the graphics memory or RAM. The fastest cards are capable of producing up to sixty 3D images per second. The human eye can only see twenty five per second, but more are needed to make a 3D game flow smoothly. If you are using your computer only for word processing, email, and Internet browsing, any of the newer laptops will do the trick with the card that is included, even if it is integrated. If you want to do more graphics intensive work such as in Photoshop or Illustrator, then a separate card is preferable. If you use your laptop for on-line 3D games, then you would want to go with the best card your budget allows, or one that is separate from the mother board, has a lot of memory and a fast processor. An example of this type of graphics card is the 128MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS. This card from NVIDIA has 128MB of RAM, GeForce is just a name, and 8400M GS is the model number. Most computer sellers only list this kind of basic information about the graphics cards. To get the full specs on any card listed for a computer, you need to go to the manufacturer's website.
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