Dell 400 Owner's Manual

Also see for Dimension 9150: Setup guide Service manual Owner's manual

Contents

28 Setting Up and Using Your Computerw w w . d e l l . c o m | s u p p o r t . d e l l . c o mHyper-ThreadingHyper-Threading is an Intel® technology that can enhance overall computer performance byallowing one physical processor to function as two logical processors, capable of performing certaintasks simultaneously. It is recommended that you use the Microsoft® Windows® XP Service Pack 1(SP1) or later operating system because Windows XP is optimized to take advantage ofHyper-Threading technology. While many programs can benefit from Hyper-Threading, someprograms have not been optimized for Hyper-Threading and may require an update from thesoftware manufacturer. Contact the software manufacturer for updates and information aboutusing Hyper-Threading with your software.To determine if your computer is using Hyper-Threading technology:1 Click the Start button, right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.2 Click Hardware and click Device Manager.3 In the Device Manager window, click the plus (+) sign next to Processors. If Hyper-Threadingis enabled, the processor is listed twice.You can enable or disable Hyper-Threading through system setup. For more information onaccessing system setup, see page 116. For more information on Hyper-Threading, search theKnowledge Base on the Dell Support website at support.dell.com.About Your RAID ConfigurationThis section provides an overview of the RAID configuration that you might have selected whenyou purchased your computer. Although several RAID configurations are available, Dell offerseither a RAID level 0 configuration or a RAID level 1 configuration. A RAID level 0configuration is recommended for high-performance gaming, and a RAID level 1 configurationis recommended for the data integrity requirements of digital photography and audio.The Intel® RAID controller on your computer can only create a RAID level 0 configurationusing two or three physical drives. If a third drive is present, then that drive can be made part ofa RAID level 0 configuration using the Intel RAID configuration program, or it can be used as aspare drive in a RAID level 1 configuration (see "Creating a Spare Hard Drive" on page 36). Thedrives should be the same size in order to ensure that the larger drive does not containunallocated (and therefore unusable) space.NOTE: RAID levels do not represent a hierarchy. A RAID level 1 configuration is not inherently better orworse than a RAID level 0 configuration.RAID Level 0 ConfigurationA RAID level 0 configuration uses a storage technique known as "data striping" to provide a highdata access rate. Data striping is a method of writing consecutive segments, or stripes, of datasequentially across the physical drives to create a large virtual drive. Data striping allows one ofthe drives to read data while the other drive is searching for and reading the next block.