Measure of Performance

Occasionally, I compare the speed of execution of a code example with the speed of execution of an alternative way of implementing the same logic. The performance comparison is simply empirical and has been done on a Dell Latitude C640 with a 2 GHZ Pentium 4 processor, 512 MB of RAM, and a 40GB hard drive running Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition. In running these comparisons, I used Visual Studio .NET 2003 with .NET 1.1. Nothing else intensive was being executed while measuring the performance.