How to Buy a Computer, Part 2
OK, so we’ve talked about the bits that matter when choosing the computer. Why do they matter?
Well, it’s possible to go out there and buy a top of the range computer with all the best items in it. But unless you have seriously too much money in your pocket, or you’re a games geek with a burning need to push the boundaries of what’s possible and do it all at an inch short of light speed, the chances are you’d be spending money you don’t need to spend.
Most computer users will tell you all about how you need the latest and bestest and that if you don’t get it you’ll be behind the pace within a few weeks. But unless you want to buy into the Wintel game, that horse don’t run. The only reason for upgrading to a better or faster machine is if what you have will not do what you need it to. If the software and hardware do all you need, there is no need to change it.
Windows will give you speed problems after some time (usually three months or more) but following the steps from ‘Old Age? Or Just Clogged Arteries?’ can have it back up to speed without expense.
So… what do you need? If you’re like most computer users, nearly all your time will be spent either browsing the internet or using Office products like Word or Excel. For these functions all you need is a vanilla, out of the box desktop machine. The current standard level will do all you want and do it well.
Right now you are looking at something like 1 Gigabyte RAM, 160Gigabyte Hard Disk and onboard Video and Network. It will probably not come with a wireless network card if it’s a desktop. Attach this machine to a broadband modem & it will do all normal internet use and run Office 2007 on Windows XP very nicely. To run Office 2007 on Windows Vista you would need to double the RAM to 2GB.
For video work like turning your DV-Cam footage into DVD, you will need to add in a fairly good video card. Something like, as a minimum, a 256MB NVidia card would do nicely. If you’re into video editing, you’d want at least an NVidia Geforce 7600 card to avoid growing old waiting for video processing to complete.
More soon on what you need to do what you do…
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