People often ask me what computer they should buy. My standard response is "it depends." A computer is just a tool. As with any tool, the features you need depend on what you want to do with it. After all, you wouldn’t buy a hammer if you need to smooth out the surface of a piece of wood. You’d buy a planer or a sander.
With a computer, it’s really no different. First, you need to ask yourself what you want to do with the computer. Do you want to just send e-mail? Or do you want to scan in lots of photos and edit them in a high-end image editing tool like Photoshop? Do you want to play games on your computer? If you want to do heavy duty gaming with serious graphics, you need a much more powerful computer than if you just want to exchange e-mails with the kids.
When it comes to technology, the specifications change hourly as to what’s the top of the line, so I don’t bother keeping up. I figure out what all the current latest and greatest acronyms and terms mean when I’m actually in the market to buy. Then I determine what I need and which components will meet those needs within my price range.
For example, serious gamers and people doing high-end graphics tend to require the most powerful computers they can get. That means a computer with a fast CPU, a lot of RAM, a video card with a lot of memory, good speakers and sound, along with a high-quality monitor.
In between the gamer/graphic artist and the occasional e-mailer are other degrees of computer user. For example, if you’re an accountant doing spreadsheets, you don’t need as much graphic power, but you do need pure computing power. So you can skip the expensive video card, but you’ll still want a fast CPU and quite a bit of RAM. Along the same lines, if you’re into burning music CDs, you might want to spend your extra money on better speakers and sound, instead of on an expensive video card.
Of course, we all have our biases too. I’m a keyboard nut and spent $200 on a really good keyboard. Most people don’t care. I also spend a lot of time looking at my monitor laying out pages for publishing projects, so I have a dual monitor system.
Again, it’s all about what you want to do and what’s important to you when it comes to computing. And no matter who you are, be sure you get and use some type of back up system. Using your fast, cool new computer can be fun, but losing data is not.