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NickAskew · Moderator Joined: 03 Nov 2006 Posts: 112 Location: Thirsk

Q: ... What does the following computer jargon mean? ...

A:

800Mhz front side bus (FSB) refers to the speed your computer can transfer data between the cpu and RAM.

Gigabit Ethernet refers to the network controller on the motherboard of the PC, this is a decent speed these days (as opposed to 100megabit which was common place 2 years ago) but it fairly irrelevant if you only have one pc at home because I assume you will use this port to plug your computer into a broadband modem, which itself will be running less than 20megabits, (essentially wasting the other 980megabits your network controller is capable of). Gigabit Ethernet is useful if you have multiple PC's at home that you like to copy large amounts of data between.

Wake-on-LAN refers to the ability of your computer to be woken up from a sleep state by data/activity on the network controller (the same controller identified above 'ethernet') - This isn't something that is usually used in a domestic setting, businesses use this functionality in servers to wake them up remotely to perform tasks - extremely useful when technicians are working remotely to the physical PC hardware (i.e. they can't physically push the on button)

The web site listed below provides excellent descriptions of computer Jargon, click on a computer component and then look down the page for the header of the product list, it will give you links to the descriptions applicable to the computer item you are looking at http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Products.ASP?CatID=11&FilterCategories=404&Thumbnails=yes

Bit techie:
The only thing it doesn't seem to explain is the statement (2x2mb cache), which is referring to the amount of memory on each core of the dual core processor - I like using analogies so here goes:
If you needed to get a lot of water up a ladder (assuming you didn't have a hose pipe..), then you would need a suitably sized bucket. If you had a very small bucket, then you would need to make lots of trips up and down the ladder filling it, if you used a bucket twice as large, then you would need to make half as many trips - on chip cache (which comes in two main types, level 1 and level 2, level is exceptionally fast and expensive hence you don't usually get much of this, and level 2 is a little bit slower but still fairly expensive and this is what is referred to above - 2mb = 2megabytes per processor 'core') buffers data taken from RAM, so the more cache you have, the less likely your processor is to have to wait to load more instructions from your main RAM.