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 19" 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...
When I am building / buying a PC, I always insist on a minimum of 2GB Ram. Memory these days is inexpensive and can improve performance of your PC greatly. If a machine has 512mb Ram dont touch it, if it has 1GB it is OK, and will do most of what you want competently. Vista is a large operating system, and uses a lot of resources. Ram is key to performance.
Processors !!! These are a personal choice, some prefer Intel Pentium, some prefer AMD. ME PERSONALLY use AMD64 dual core Processors, not that I have anything against Intel Pentium, they are good Processors, I prefer AMD. Realistically you need something about 4.0-4.5 ghz this will give you plenty of power.
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. Remember, the bigger the drive, the more information you will put on it, the more you will loose if it fails.
Hopefully this will help you.
If you want to contact me for a machine
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07786 967281
