Hi angel... I'm a little late here.

It's not all that complicated it's just that there's all these completely never-heard-of-before terms being thrown at you in all directions and making your head spin.

I agree that Dell is a good bet. I've purchased a number of machines from them and a few laptops too for the office (at home I build my own ). I like their customer service. However I always know exactly what I want when I purchase so I cannot speak toward how helpful (and accurate) they are when helping you pick components. I would imagine they are rather knowledgeable because they have a good rep.

I also [have] been able to upgrade machines rather easily with standard components, included adding memory, changing hard drives, and adding a CD burner to one. I was worried that some of their software might be "tweaked" for their machine and would have problems with off-the-shelf stuff, but last year I upgraded ALL the machines in the office from Win98 to WinXP with absolutely no problem... that is not an "upgrade" install but a complete erase-and-start-from-scratch install and had not one single problem with drivers for any of the components.

Now the "complicated" part: what you need.

I'm going to make this a bit general for the possible benefit of others too. The first thing to think about is "what are you going to do with the machine." A lot of people are buying a computer strictly for email, web surfing, and of course now digital cameras and photo printing are becoming popular. Maybe some word processing too.

Any basic computer will perform all these tasks well. Very well. WindowsXP Home edition would be the OS (there is also a "media" edition, not sure what it includes, but at least some stuff for digital video editing).

Memory should be a minimum of 256M. 512M preferred, probably the "sweet spot" for most users, more would be overkill. (angel be sure to read to the end!)

Hard drives are pretty large now so that is not as much an issue. They do fill up faster than you think they will but with the explosion in size the past few years I think they have far outgrown our ability to fill them easily unless you are recording sound (not mp3, those are small) or doing digital video recording.

Speed of the drive should not be of concern for most people. Applications that require a faster drive are things like video editing and recording tools, as they have to keep up with the large flow of data. The advertised "rpm" of a drive contributes to it's speed (remember that it is how fast the drive can read data and send it to the processor that is important) but other things play a role as well.

I wouldn't worry a lot about speed. If you have a choice and it doesn't break the bank I would recommend the Western Digital drives marked as "special edition". (I think they have "jb" at the end of their model number) There is an 80GB SE, 120GB SE, and up. I really think 80G would be fine but it never hurts to get more. If there is much of a price difference then don't worry about size (as long as it is at least 80G... smaller would probably be OK too but I don't know if they are offering much smaller nowadays). Also don't worry about the speed (or SE model) if there is a noticable price difference.

Video card: This depends A LOT on what you are going to be doing. For most people an average card is FINE. People who need more are people who are into gaming, especially serious gaming. Cutting edge games are really the software driving the hardware these days. Each new video card offers new software features... not consumer things but things programmers can use to make their games appear more realistic. If a game is written for a particular set of features, a card that doesn't match won't get full benefit of all the graphics. Top of the line video card designers like GeForce and Radion get $300 and up for a card that is obsolete as soon as you get it out of the box (even more literally true than when you say that about computers in general . If a machine is for gaming, I would highly recommend talking to someone knowledgeable in that area to get your best options.

For run of the mill tasks like word processing and internet, any video card will be bored and yawning before you are. Any basic card will be good for the task. You could ask, but usually the "standard" video that Dell offers should be fine, the offered "upgrades" would be more for video gamers.

PCI vs AGP shouldn't be an issue but I'll tell you so you can impress the salesman. The thing that makes our computers so flexible (and why buying one is so compicated) is because they are designed with a base system and a series of places to plug in the components you want to add. On the back of your computer you see the parallel slots... some covered and some with jacks or plugs sticking out the back. They're where your monitor plugs in, maybe also your phone line, maybe a network jack, and possibly other things. Inside the computer these plug into the base module which is called the motherboard. The motherboard has the processor itself (intel inside!) and holds the memory and all the stuff to make everything connect and work with everything else. Along the edge are a series of slots where cards plug in. These slots are standard, both in size and in electrical charactaristics, so that a variety of different types of things can be plugged into them. When the motherboard is installed the edge of any installed card lines up with the slots in the back of the case, and so provides the means to connect things to those cards.

The specs, with regard to how and what data goes through those slots and at what speed has changed over the years as new, better techolgies have come along. Some of you may remember "ISA" slots, those were the standard for quite some time. Then PCI (see, I am answering your question!) came along, offering much faster speed... data can move back and forth along the connections (it is called a "bus") faster and better and therefore helps the speed of the overall machine.

A thing to note is that as the technology grows, it really has to grow in all areas that make up a computer. The faster and faster processors we have today would mean nothing if the data "bus" were still slow and memory modules were slow. If the processor couldn't move data around very fast its extra speed would really be of no use. This is one reason why computers always seem to be "obsolete" as soon as you buy them. All the different technologies are improving and playing "catch up" with one another in a continually involving process. It is not like someone invents one new thing and them BAM the next generation of computers are born.

So for a while motherboards had both PCI and ISA slots, so people could use their old ISA cards and also make use of faster, new PCI components. Now ISA is a dinosaur. PCI is the current standard. Next week (I'm exagerating, don't paninc, but it will be soon) a new technology is set to take over called PCI-X that is faster than PCI. In the interim the bus speed of PCI has increased over the years as well so it isn't like PCI itself hasn't improved in all this time.

Normally your video card would take one of those PCI slots, except another new technology was introduces called AGP. Sounds complicated? It's not. AGP is just a slot like a PCI slot. But remember how I said the PCI slot is part of a bus that transfers data? And therefore all the cards plugged into the bus have to share the line for that data? AGP is a separate slot that doesn't share resources with the other cards. It can share data directly with the processor and also I think talk directly to the memory in your system. Once again, this is of most interest to video gamers. Since the video card is the thing that is "sweating the most" in a system when you are gaming... a lot of cutting edge technology goes not just into the cards but into the connection to the computer. There are a few different "flavors" of AGP, with different data speeds, and of importance to system builders, different voltages. You can fry a video card by putting the wrong kind of AGP video card in the wrong kind of slot. You won't have to worry about that at all since they are assembling the system for you, they'll only pick and offer components that work together.

So AGP is just a way to connect a card to a computer, like PCI (and very similar in many ways) except that AGP is ONLY for compatible AGP video cards (where as PCI takes many different kinds of plug in cards) and where everything connected to PCI has to "share the line" AGP has a single, direct line to the Kremlin (or to the Batcave... take your pick .)

I didn't realize they were even giving a choice anymore between AGP and PCI for video. I'd go for AGP just on principal unless the price difference is conciderable. PCI won't really slow you down noticably though if you are trying to go as inexpensive as possible. Unless, as I said, you are planning on gaming or maybe video.

(continued)

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