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Archive for February 28th, 2011

Looking to buy a new desktop? Not sure what you should get? This article will help you choose from the bounty of options out there, and help you make sure you get your money’s worth.

The first and main consideration you should think about is what you want to do with your computer. Are you just going to use it for word processing and surfing the net? Or are you a big media user, listening to music and watching movies? Or are video games your thing? What you will use the computer for is the primary determinant of what computer you should buy: You don’t want to pay for capabilities you won’t use, but you do want to make sure you can do what you want with it.

If you’re just going to use it for writing or surfing the internet, you don’t need an especially powerful computer. Any of the basic models out there will serve your purposes, and there’s no need to spend money on power you’re not going to use. An entry level model will do you just fine, and you can get one for only $200-$400, generally with a monitor, keyboard and mouse included.

If your computer is going to be your media center, the main things you want to invest in are hard drive space and RAM, or random access memory. Hard drive space is what will let you store plenty of music or videos, and RAM will let you keep big playlists accessible, as well as letting high-definition video play without skipping or stuttering. You don’t need to spend money on an especially powerful processor, or a video card. If you want to create music or videos, on the other hand, you might want a good CPU for rendering purposes, but for simple playback, hard drive and RAM should be your primary targets.

If you’re a power user, and are going to be, for example, playing lots of new video games, or running complicated programs such as simulations, then you want to get the latest and greatest of everything. For video games in particular, it’s important to have plenty of RAM and a good video card. The CPU is something that’s a little less important: You want it to be powerful enough to be able to run what you want, but you’ll see rapidly decreasing returns after that. Figure out what’s important to you, and invest your money wisely.

Thinking about these things will let you invest your money wisely. Happy computing!