Does your computer measure up to thousands of others? Geekbench has the answer

Does your computer feel tired, slow -- is a poor performer? Or have you tweaked, tuned and optimized your system so much that you're sure it's delivering the best possible speeds? Whatever you think of your PC's performance, there's only one way to get a solid and objective view of its speed, and that's by using an excellent benchmarking tool like Geekbench.

Launch the program, click the "Run Benchmarks" button, and Geekbench will run some exhaustive tests on your CPU and RAM's performance, before producing a detailed report with all the figures you need.

Click the "Submit" button, create a free account with Geekbench (if you haven't already done so) and log in, then click the "Similar Systems Link." And in a second or two you'll see a chart comparing your result with other Geekbench users. Our test system (the red dot) was just above mid-range for its processor speed, so no real problems there. If your system scores are on the low side, though, that may be an indicator that it's not configured properly, so it could be worth checking your system settings for possible problems.

This won't tell you everything, of course. Geekbench only measures CPU and RAM performance, so if you have a bottleneck elsewhere -- a slow hard drive, say -- it won't be able to help.

Still, this is a useful way to get an objective view on how your PC's performance compares with others. And if you'd like to benchmark other areas of your PC, then you can always try something like SiSoft Sandra 2011 or AIDA64, which are able to test the speed of your hard drive, removable storage, file system, video rendering and network performance, along with many other details.