Manufacturers
want you to believe that you need a 3GHz Pentium 4 with a 120GB hard
drive for web browsing and email, but you don’t. Most people
will be thrilled with “low end” desktops, such as Dell’s
Dimension 2400 P4-2.4GHz system for only $349.
Operating System
Most new desktop PC's come pre-loaded with either Windows XP Home or Windows XP
Professional. Windows XP Professional offers a few nice features over XP Home, but both
of these are decent, reasonably stable and easy to use operating systems. Unless you're
very tech savvy, avoid Windows 2000, and always avoid Windows 98 or 95 unless you plan
to upgrade to Windows XP.
Processor
Intel is the processor of choice for most desktop PC makers. Although casual users
would be fine with a Celeron based machine, Pentium 4 based machines are faster and very
affordable. Casual home users should thus look for Pentium 4 2.4GHz or faster machines.
For power users, look for Pentium 4 3.2 GHz 800MHz FSB based desktops.
If you're considering an AMD powered desktop, look for an Athlon XP 2600+ or faster
processor and avoid the slower AMD Duron based machines.
Graphics Card
Cheaper desktops include an embedded motherboard based graphics chipset. These tend to
be a bit on the slow side but are probably fine for email/web surfing. For any other
task, look for an AGP based graphics card, such as any ATI Radeon 9x00 card or the ATI
Fire GL.
RAM
128MB of RAM is the absolute minimum recommended for today's operating
systems and software applications. 256MB is better, and 512MB is enough for nearly all
but the most demanding users.
Office Application
Cheaper desktops include some kind of less useful (in our opinion)
application such as
Wordperfect, but the best office
app in our opinion is the new Microsoft Office 2003 or even Microsoft Office XP. If
adding Office XP to your desktop configuration raises the price too much, check Ebay or
ResellerRatings price search to find this software cheaper - it's the same exact
software as the desktop manufacturer sells and is easy to install.
Hard Drive
Look for an 80GB 7200RPM IDE hard drive, as there is not really a reason to go with a
smaller or slower drive than this. Some systems come equipped with 120GB drives which
are great for holding lots of images, movies, or many games, but aren't really needed
for machines intended solely for email and web surfing. Video editing professionals
should consider faster (and more expensive) SCSI drives, and those who are concerned
about data reliability should consider IDE RAID for redundancy (RAID uses two or more
hard drives to store and mirror your data so that if one drive fails, you don't skip a
beat).
Optical Drives
A DVD-ROM drive is a must, any many systems include two optical drives, one DVD-ROM and
one CDRW, for easy CD copying. If you want to make your own DVD's or backup a lot of
data onto a DVD (4.7GB), consider one of the new DVD-RAM drives.
If
you’ve been waiting to replace an outdated PC, now is a great
time. The most important thing to understand is that the majority
of software has not, by any stretch of the imagination, caught up
to the computing power of most current day desktops.