Tuesday, November 4, 2008

BUYING A NEW COMPUTER

It's that time of year when you may be purchasing a computer as a holiday gift for someone.

And the question always comes up, what specs should I look for. So here's a rundown of the important components you want:

Laptops -
  • Centrino 2 chipset technology
  • 15" screen size
  • at least 2GB of RAM
  • Video card memory of 256MB

Desktops -

  • Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Athlon 64 X2 or Turion X2
  • 64-bit Vista OS
  • at least a 17" Widescreen flat panel
  • at least 2GB of RAM
  • Video card memory of 256MB

As far as hard drives, get as large a drive as you can afford. Nowadays, it's easy to fill 250GB.

64-bit versions of Vista operating system allows your PC to recognize 4GB of RAM or more. But beware that the 64-bit version may not be compatible with older programs and peripherals. If that's a concern, go with the 32-bit version.

If you are a high-end user, you may need a real workhorse, which means more RAM, more video card memory and faster chipset.

That should be enough to point you in the right direction.