Home Computers, A buyer's guide

It's very tempting when choosing to buy a computer to either buy the cheapest one on offer or allowing yourself to be blinded by the salesman's jargon. That's OK, buying a PC is like buying a car and we all know how pushy car salesmen can be!

What you need to do first of all is think about what you're typically going to use your computer for, this will often dictate how much money you are likely going to have to fork out. There are of course money saving ways to get some added performance for almost any PC at a later date and the great thing about Desktop PCs is that unlike laptops; in a few years when the tech world has moved on and your PC is slower than the average then you can replace the slow parts with faster parts for the fraction of the cost of replacing the entire laptop.

Word Processing and Web Browsers

If you are simply goingto be using your PC to browse the internet or word processing then you are not going to need to spend thousands of dollars and can even look to buying a smaller PC such as a MiniITX based system. These PCs are tiny and get the job done The picture below show a few smaller system that provide just the right ammount of power and performance to fulfil your needs. These systems will typically be around $300-400 in price and are normally fairly unobstrusive compared to enormous gaming PCs that are venturing into dishwasher size territiory!

Photo editors and music fans

Most households will end up buying a system like this as many of us now have digital cameras and MP3 players. If you're one of these people then you are likely to need lots of hard drive space to store all the treasured memories and lists of tunes. The other concern to have is the processor speed and memory (RAM), if you're editing a lot of photos which you will probably end up doing even if it's just getting rid of that pesky red eye then you'll need to be using programs like Photoshop or something similar and these programs are fairly taxing on processors.

You're typically going to be looking for something around the 2GHz speed, most modern processors are dual core, in that it's almost like having two processors slapped on top of each other. A dual core processor can handle much more things going on at once so you'll be able to edit photos while a home movie is being put on to a DVD in the background whilst listening to your music all running smoothly without any stuttering or minutes staring at the Egg Timer!

Most PCs with larger storage and faster procesors are going to be more expensive and you ar elikely to be looking at spending around $800 and up. With regards to storage this can easily be added in the future whethe it's another internal hard drive or an external USb drive. RAM is also a fairly cheap way to speed up your system and is notoriously easy to install for that extra hit of speed.

CPUs are more expensive so you're probably best concentrating on getting a fast processor that should last a few good years before it's left in the dust by new technology (Unfortunately all computer parts will become old hat and slow eventually, but being able to swap them out in the future as opposed to an entire brand new system measn you'll save yourself some money in the long run)

Companies like Dell and Walmart will sell typical family desktop PCs which can easily be configured to your requirement as well as this you could take the plunge and build it yourself or speak ot a local computer specialist who may be able to build a PC for you to spec.

Hardcore Gaming PCs

These are the top of the line models with dedicated 3D Video cards to pump out the cutting edge video games and Sound cards that give you the Surround sound effect of the cinemas. Gaming PCs are possibly the most expensive PCs you can buy or build, almost every individual part will be the best you can buy in hope of smooth graphics and speedy performance.

When buying a gaming PC you are definately going to be looking at spending almost $2,000 in some cases so it's definitely the more dedicated crowd who will spend this much. The advantage of PCs as gaming machines over say, an Xbox360 or a Playstation3 is that in a few years when your machine struggles with the newer games you can probably get away with buying a new graphics card (around $200-$300) instead of a whole new video games console!

Graphics cards and sound cards are things that you need to look into spending more money on, faster processors and RAM upgrades to at least 2Gb are need if you want to play game slike the one shown below in all their glory.