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.