The first question you should be asking yourself is, “Why am I buying a computer?”
The purpose of the computer should be your first point of consideration. Computers do not all work the same. One $3000 computer can vastly differ to another $3000 computer. There are various components inside that makes up a computer and increasing the capabilities of specific components would give each computer different advantages. This is why it is very important to ask yourself why you want a computer. After you have answered this question you can then venture out into selecting the computer that suits your needs.
There are 4 main reasons a person would want a computer.
- To surf the internet and communicate with friends
- For work:
- documentations, reports and data analysis
- presentations such as proposals, job pitches and such
- Graphics designs, photo and video editing
- Gaming
Lets analysis each purpose and understand how they relate back to a computer.
THE INTERNET & SOCIAL COMMUNICATION
Most people are familiar with the internet. In fact most of us have surfed the internet at least once. The internet appeals to each and every one of us in different ways. I personally like the internet because there is a wealth of information that is available at the click of the mouse. There are websites from which you can look up general information, there are those that you can look up words like a dictionary, then there are specific sites to suit you own personal interest such as hobbies, animals, pets, book reviews, hardware, computers, medical, and the list goes on.
On a social basis you would find online emails to be quick, easy and cheap methods to keep in touch. There are many free online email services available to anyone with a connection to the internet. This way you can stay connected with family and friends without having to worry about what country you are in or whether that country have the same softwares you have on your computer. You simply logon to the site and wah-lah! you can read and reply your mails.
There are sites for you to create your own photo albums which are a great way of sharing your pictures with family and friends who are not anywhere nearby. You can update your online photo album from any part of the world and your family and friends can view it from home. Today, online email services have developed into social online gatherings where people can put up their personal likes and dislikes to meet other people. You can link a group of people with similar interest and communicate via mass email messaging. Link them to specific photo albums that only they can view, and they cannot check out the other photo album of you and that Russian chick you met in France.
Blog is a new term that has taken the voice of the free people online, worldwide and to greater heights. You can start a blog site for free and type anything that you feel like typing online and share it with a just few friends, with many friends or with anyone who is interested to hear your thoughts. Some people use blogs to share theirs lives with the world, an online dairy so to speak. Other websites have taken all these elements of emails, chat groups, photo albums and integrated them into a single service. Social sites like Friendster allow you to meet friends of your friends and expand your universe so that your next house party would have the coolest turnouts.
I personally believe that there is something out there on the internet for everyone - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and open all year round.
For this purpose all you really need is a very basic system with an internet connection. You won’t need high end graphics capabilities nor would you need high capacity memory or storage devices. Here ‘keeping it sweet and simply’ should be your motto.
FOR WORK
At the office there are two main groups of users. One group, normally the clerks, personal assistants, lower management executives and such, use the computer mainly to produce documentation, reports, letters and such – very basic typewriter sort of workout. The other group has discovered presentation softwares and uses these wares to impress upper management and clients alike.
For the first group, requirements are much similar with internet users as they are basically using a very expensive hi-tech typewriter. I still find it amusing seeing fellow colleagues fill out a spreadsheet with a calculator next to them. As for the latter group, all they need is a slight increase in memory capacity. As presentation slides tend to use pictures to better convey the message. Pictures take up memory capacity and could slowdown your computer at the wrong time.
GRAPHIC DESIGN, PHOTO & VIDEO EDITING
This is clearly a computer-literate group of users as it does take some know-how in order to do this. Graphic design, photo and video editing are very complicated tasks as you can create or modify pictures and videos with a myriad of effects. You can make a person look older or younger with a basic graphic editing software or you can drastically change the background or merge several pictures to create effects that a camera alone cannot do. You can create your own home-made movie with almost Hollywood quality outcome. The amount of things that you can do with the right tools is a whole book on its own.
If you plan to purchase a computer for this purpose, the most crucial component would be the graphic accelerator. All computers come with one built on board. The problem is that it uses you main memory capacity to handle all the graphics (be it photos, animation or videos) and graphics consume a lot of memory. This will reduce your computer’s performance tremendously. To overcome this you will need to add on an additional graphic accelerator with an independent memory capacity and free your main memory of from all that work. The larger the memory capacity on the graphic accelerator, the better you computer will perform.
However, this alone will not be sufficient. You will also need a higher memory capacity on your computer to run the program itself. I won’t get into the technicality of why this is, just take my word for it that if you do not have at least 1024Mb of RAM (your computer’s main memory) you will still be chugging along like an old horse pulling a house.
GAMING
I often tell people that gamers not only live in a world of their own, but they are also a little psycho (this coming from personal experience).
You see games are very hardware dependent and have basically been one of the main driving force behind the development of higher performance computer. Games require high capacity memory, high performance graphic accelerators and reliable high performance processors. Game developers are constantly coming up with more and more complex games to cater to its ever demanding audience. This in turn demands higher performance computing, so computer component manufacturers have to constantly develop better machines.
I won’t get into this arena too much as, gamers already understand what they need to play the games they like. To keep it simple, everything in a gamer’s computer has to be high-end stuff and complete.
Previous Topic Next Topic
From here on in, we are going to learn what makes up a computer and what all those words in the computer catalogue mean. So before we proceed, you will need to learn some basic computer jargon. Please note that not all the descriptions here are accurate. I had purposefully done so for the benefit of computer illiterate readers.
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