Our September 2007 survey polled the folks visiting the PC Pitstop web site to determine just how intimate people are with their PCs. Nine out of ten people surveyed indicated that they knew the manufacturer of their PC, the size of their hard drives and how much RAM is installed. Almost as many indicated that they remember the model number of their PC and who manufactured the CPU. No surprises there. These are the common attributes that PC marketers highlight in their ads and that most people look for when buying a PC.

On the bottom end of the list, overall only 67% of the people responded that they knew the clock speed of their PC. Clock speed, once a key indicator of PC performance has probably become a more confusing and lesser remembered PC specification due to the changes in Intel and AMD microarchitecture that have made the raw identified CPU speed no longer an absolute measurement of performance. (See the PC Pitstop article on CPU clock speeds). Other PC attributes at the bottom of the list included specifications such as maximum display resolution, sound card manufacturer, BIOS manufacturer and motherboard cache size.

Attributes that surfaced to the top of list included items that most people would normally consider and shop for when buying a PC. Females lagged males slightly for the percentages of those indicating that they knew these values for their PC.

The gap between male and female widened for the PC attributes included in our survey that were least known or remembered. Males appear to have the edge in being the "geekiest" gender.

The males responding to our survey were almost 4 times more likely than the females to have built their own PC.

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