I legitimately didn't intend to be condescending. In my experience people don't understand that for a computer to be "fast," you have multiple possible bottle-necks: hard drive read/write, CPU, RAM, network bandwidth, etc. My very intelligent father-in-law (I mean this seriously, he's very intelligent, and was a programmer for years.) wanted to boost his internet speed, and upgrade from DSL to cable. (something like 15mbs to 100mbs) Well, he didn't really notice much speed difference. And this was because he was seldom, if ever, saturating his 15mbs link. In fact, on a modern webpage, there are so many new TCP connections that each one can be a bit slow despite bandwidth. (and this is to say nothing of the delay incurred by actually trying to render the js and other elements on the page.)

My point was that most consumers don't understand these things, and just assume that "computer speed" is one-dimensional: it's either fast, or not fast.