Home | Money | Energy | Food & Drink | House & Garden | Grow Your Own | Backyard Hens | Transport | Links | Books | Green Gear

Computers - Why Spend Too Much?

The first question to ask yourself before purchasing a new computer is "What do I need it for and what am I going to do on it?" Bit like buying a lawnmower, why buy a 36" Rotary when you've got a lawn that's 15' x 8'?

Much of the time the average computer is just sitting waiting for the human to press the next key. Chips are so fast nowadays that jobs like writing an essay or financial calculations on a spreadsheet hardly wake them up.

Where the average family computer does work now is with games and videos. With the advent of fast broadband, and there are plans to make broadband much faster, on-demand TV is becoming common.

What Computer to Buy?

Back in 1965, the co-founder of Intel Gordon E Moore predicted that the capacity of computer chips would double every 2 years. This has become known as Moore's law and in effect computer capacity does double every two years whilst the price tends to fall.

This really means that the cheapest system you buy today will be far faster and cheaper than a top of range system from a year ago. Unless you have special requirements, it's not worth paying much for a top spec computer, go for the cheap one.

Don't be overwhelmed by computer sales jargon, imagine you were buying a car and wanted a family runabout but the salesman kept pushing a Ferrari. So, unless you're a PC Geek and want that extra 1/1000 of a second speed, there's no reason to spend a lot of money. Buy the one which suits your needs and off you go !

Here's a few definitions so you at least have some idea of what the salespeople are talking about.

Motherboard

This is a bit like the chassis on a car. It's a main circuit board on which just about everything is attached. All the bits plug into the motherboard.

CPU or Chip

This is the amazing heart of the computer, its brain so to speak. The higher the number, the faster it is although things like on-chip cache (don't worry about it) make a difference. They come in two flavours – AMD and Intel. Doesn't really make much difference which you go for, they both work.

RAM or Memory

Abbreviation of Random Access Memory. This type of memory is used to store the programmes which are running at that time. This can be a bit confusing. The hard drive is where the computer stores files but memory is used to keep them in mind. As a rule, the more memory the better and it's bought in gigabytes, GB.

Windows XP can only effectively use 4GB of Ram so more is pointless. But as new operating systems like Vista and its successors come out the amount of memory your computer can effectively use will increase. Here, in early 2009, my advice is not to bother with more than 4GB. By 2012 that could be 128GB for top flight machines.

Hard Drive or Disk

This is your computer's filing cabinet. My first PC had a 20MB hard drive and my second 40MB. My current machine has 500GB which is 512,000MB. Yes, it's 25,600 times larger than my first PC. Video files are huge and software has become much larger so goodness knows what you'll need in 2012. For now, 500GB is more than adequate.

Graphics Card

This is simply what you plug the monitor into. Most lower end PC's have the graphics built into the Motherboard. This should be perfectly fine for normal work. Should you get into gaming and high spec stuff, you can up-grade to a separate graphics card which takes the job of rendering the images on the screen of the CPU and doesn't use up the computer's memory.

Monitor

This is the TV screen that you look at. Some of the latest high definition televisions can actually be used as a monitor. A doubt you could find one of the old bulky TV style monitors now, they're all the flat screen type and price has dropped incredibly. We replaced a monitor we bought in 2000 for £350 with a better one for £90. They'll be giving them away with breakfast cereals next!

Conclusion

Don't be bamboozled into buying the highest specification and latest system. The cheapest will be more than you need for the next few years by which time they'll have dropped in price and increased in performance again.

Saving Money by Saving Energy!

Low Cost Living
Low Cost Living
The Book!

 
Tell a friend
about this site