How To Buy A New Computer

Not terribly long ago, I wrote that anyone considering the purchase of a new computer should 'Stay calm despite tempting computer prices.' The revolution that took about six years to develop was underway at the time and newer technologies revolutionized the guts of PC's we can buy in the stores.

Break time is over. Capable 64-bit applications, processors and Operating Systems (OS's) are now mingling on store shelves with the old, standard 32-bit applications. SDRAM was stamped out by DDR RAM that fathered DDR2 and DDR3. Graphics hardware has become a branch of processor science all to itself. Single core processor motherboards share the market with dual-core processors and dual processor motherboards. Add to all that clutter on the market the impending release of the World's largest software maker's newest OS due out shortly and you get panic at purchase time.

With the idea of a computer purchase between 'now' and mid-2007, here's what's best for us... We'll need either a 3Ghz single core processor or a dual-core processor that's 2Ghz or better if we can't get a computer with TWO processors. We can even explore purchasing a 64-bit OS for any 64-bit processor scheme that we like provided the letters X and P don't show up together in the OS title.

Getting DDR2 RAM (the computer's short-term memory) where one stick provides a minimum of 512MB is great insurance against being left behind by a faster future. The DDR2 prefix means that it won't soon be phased out, but will get old enough soon to drop in price when it comes time to purchase another 512MB or even 1GIG stick to increase performance. Keep your eyes sharp on the Specification sheets and know that 'dual channel' DDR RAM is okay too.

Your love of graphics may not extend beyond the picture you have on your personalized desktop, but pay heed! "Shared RAM" was one of the best ideas ever, but is now so completely backward and obsolete that it's a term to avoid at any cost. That cost is quite real in many cases; high-end graphic cards sometimes have better RAM (DDR3) than the Motherboard. But this is paramount to a future that will be filled with online video and pictures in e-mails exceeding data sizes of 3 and 4 Megabytes. Nearly any PCIe or PCI-e (most common notation) or PCI-express card will ensure that you physically have a slot to fill in the future with a more powerful PCI-e card. The antithesis of good graphics cards is the replaced nomenclature, AGP. That's the slower stuff that PCI-e helped phase out even though PCI-e was slow to mature.

Finally, we arrive at one of the most understated but vital numbers to look at when purchasing a computer that should last us a while. It's called the chipset and is usually a three-digit number where higher is better. A Pentium 4 with a 745 chipset will not deliver the computational speed that the same Pentium 4 with a 925 chipset would. This difference can create a $100 jump that's worth it in the long run. The chipset more or less represents the speed limits on the pathways that data travels on. Faster is better.

Bryan writes about a plethora of topics for http://www.DINARIUS.com where computer users are made smarter everyday. Knowledge is wealth.

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