8 Biggest Myths In Technology

Everything in this world has some myths about them and technology is no exception. Misconceptions are made from assumptions and inadequate knowledge. I can say without any embarrassment that I believed in some of these. Because no one is perfect and has knowledge about everything🤷‍♂️. It’s all about learning things, understanding it, and acknowledging our mistakes😇. These are some of the misunderstandings that I had about technology in the past. With that said, let’s bust some myths💥.

1. Refreshing windows will make your PC faster.

This is absolutely incorrect. What you are actually doing there is just reloading the icons. Sometimes, windows don’t update the contents in real-time. Therefore hitting refresh will display the changes that you made on the desktop. But I have seen people keep on pressing F5 (to refresh) right after the system is turned ON. This will actually slow down the loading process since more resources are required for loading all the icons over and over again.

2. More cores or higher frequency indicates better performance

 Not all programs are optimized to take advantage of more than two cores. Most of the applications are single-threaded programs. So having a CPU with a higher core count won’t help your PC to run faster unless the specific application supports it. Many of the modern AAA title games still can’t utilize more than four cores😐.

                                        Also many people relate two similar CPUs on the basis of their clock speed🕓. But this is not an efficient way of comparison. Clock speed or frequency is a measurement (in GHz) of how many cycles are completed in a second by the CPU. But the problem is that the number of instructions that can be executed in a clock cycle can vary among different CPUs. Processor architecture such as pipelining can also affect the overall performance. Therefore, benchmarks are the only way to find which CPU is truly better in the real world. Learn more about CPU terminologies here🔗.

3. Charging overnight will ruin your mobile battery.

This was true for older generation devices. But modern smartphones and laptops are much smarter than you think!😎 They can automatically stop charging once they reach 100% to protect the battery from overcharging. Anyway, it is not recommended to charge your Li-ion batteries to 100% all the time since it can affect longevity.

4. Computers can multitask.

Yes! Technically, it’s a myth and computers can’t multitask like we think😕. Only one instruction will be executed in a CPU at any given time. So how can we run multiple things at once with our phones and computers?🤔 Well, in the olden days, CPUs only had a single core. So if multiples programs should run at the same time, it was done by scheduling algorithms. But modern processors are equipped with more than one core which is essentially separate CPUs within a single die. Hence different cores can handle different instructions at once. 

5. Higher megapixel=better photos.

This myth is widely used by smartphone manufacturers to market their products. You see, megapixel is not the only factor that will determine the image quality. There are other things to consider such as image sensor, aperture, and most importantly image processing. Photos taken from pixel smartphone is a perfect example of this👌. Although it got only a 12 or 16 MP camera, images from pixel devices will stand out when compared other smartphones with 48 or even 64 MP camera.

6. Deleted files are gone forever.

This might sound scary, but if you think the file is actually deleted once you cleared the recycle bin, you are wrong my friend and that file is still existing in your hard disk. But how, you may ask😮. Operating systems like windows uses something called as ‘pointers’ to keep track of all the files and folders💻. So, if a file gets deleted from the recycle bin, OS is only deleting the pointer of that file and mark the space as ‘available’. From the OS perspective, that file is no longer existing. Therefore, if you act fast, you can recover deleted files with a recovery software if it’s not overwritten. Please note that this is only applicable to hard disks💽, but not SSDs.

7. New devices should charge for 6 hours.

This is not at all applicable to modern gadgets since they all are powered by a Li-Ion battery🔋. Back in days, devices were equipped with non-lithium batteries and they should be charged for 6 or 8 hours in order to increase its longevity. However, most manufacturers recommend charging the battery up to 100% before start using it for the first time.

8.Greater the RAM, Better the performance.

Many people ask their friends about ‘how much RAM it got’ whenever they get a new gadget. But performance does not only depend on the amount of RAM in any device. It’s processor and other components also matter and it is ONLY useful if the application which you are running needs it. Now we even have smartphones with 12 GB of RAM😬. I mean a decent PC around 60K is only getting 8 gigs of RAM and works well under most scenarios. So why do people need a smartphone with more than 6 GB RAM? To pin apps in system memory?😑 I honestly don’t know why OEMs are pushing more and more RAM into mobiles. But not having a sufficient amount of RAM will degrade the performance even if you got a higher-end CPU. So choose wisely.

That’s it! I hope this helped you in one way or another. Have a happy weekend!🤗