Are you thinking about investing in a new PC? Here are a few tips to try and help you through the haze.

First of all, when most people are thinking about buying a new PC, the first place that comes to mind is PC World...Good shop, stocks everything you need, and providing you know what you want you are OK. But how many of you walk in, and get led by the Sales staff, into spending more than you really want and then end up walking out with a machine that will do more than you will ever require.

I will just put my own sales pitch in here, I supply lots of PC's to people, and my first question is always : What do you use it for? Now the majority of users utilise a PC for ; Email, Surfing the Web, Letters, Spreadsheets and Photographs. In my experience these are the most common tasks that people use a PC for. I supply PC's to cover these tasks for £250 for a new box, Keyboard and Mouse, and if you want you can have a 17" Flat Screen with it for £350. Most of the machines I supply are HP and come loaded with Windows and Sotware, and a full 12 Month Guarantee. And just as a bonus I even come and set it up for you, and transfer all your files accross. Visit 'The Webmasters Store' for more info..

Now if you still want to go to a High Street Store, here are some tips...

The main problem for me at the moment is that when you buy a New PC these days, it comes with 'VISTA', no choice, it is 'VISTA'. Now ME PERSONALLY, i dont use Vista yet, there are numerous problems regarding Hardware and Software compatability issues. XP has been around for a number of Years and has served Microsoft well, with reliability and performance. Vista is getting very mixed reviews at the moment, and it is much larger in size than XP and therefore requires much more resources to run it properly, for what?.

When I am building / buying a PC, I always insist on a minimum of 1GB Ram. Memory these days is inexpensive and can improve performance of your PC greatly. If a machine has 256mb Ram dont touch it, if it has 512mb it is OK, and will do most of what you want competently.

Processors !!! These are a personal choice, some prefer Intel Pentium, some prefer AMD. ME PERSONALLY use AMD64 Processors, not that I have anything against Intel Pentium, they are good Processors, I prefer AMD. Realistically you need something about 3.0-3.5 ghz this will give you plenty of power. New Pc's are powered by dual core technology. Very nice but unless you are playing high powered games or using high end graphic packages for video editing, you wont notice any difference in performance.

Hard Drives are another item that have reduced in price an increased in capacity. You can now buy a 200gb Hard Drive for about £45-£50. My only advice with Hard Drives is make sure that you put Partitions in them. That way if your computer crashes and you need to restore, you HOPEFULLY only need to restore the Windows Partition and your documents should be OK. Nowadays with people using Hard Drives to store music PERSONALLY I always put in a 200gb, that is plenty.

Hopefully this will help you, if you want to contact me for a machine

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