The Guide to Computer Purchases

When contemplating the purchase of a computer there are quite a few factors that a buyer must consider before even looking at what is available. I have given a step-by-step procedure for the buyer to follow along with a small glossary of computer terms in this paper.

1. The first consideration should be; how many people will be using THIS computer? The reason this must be considered is that regardless of what your personal interest may be others will have different interest and the computer must be able to support everyone.


2. What do you want to use the computer for NOW and what do you think you might want to do after you are more comfortable with using it? You must ask this question of ALL potential users of the computer.


3. Where is the computer going to be used? This is important in that you need to be aware of rather you will have space restrictions or not. Along with that you need to know if where you are planning on placing the computer will have any additional disadvantages such as direct glare on the display from a window or lights. If it looks like reflection may be a problem plan on a different location. You must be sure that you also have an electrical outlet near that location. When planning your location, be sure that if possible, you leave yourself not only room for the computer but also work space around it. You will need to plan for having room around your seating so that the computer user is not constantly adjusting to allow people to pass by.


4. Even though you may not think you will, you will find yourself spending a considerable amount of time on the computer. You must be sure to have a comfortable supportive chair to use when on the computer. If you are comfortable you will enjoy your computer use more.


5. Budgeting for your computer purchase. You can find a computer that will meet most home usage requirements in all price ranges. So DO NOT allow yourself to be pressured by a sales person to spend more than is reasonable for your budget. Buy what you can afford. An additional onsideration in your budgeting must be the cost of Internet access. Be sure to allow yourself app. $30 a month for high speed Internet access. You may find a cheaper access but this is a good figure to work with for budgeting.

Once you have taken these factors into consideration it is time to see how they will affect your computer purchase.

The reason we have to determine how many people will be using the computer has to do with the various uses it will be put to. For example: an older user may just want to write letters, emails, novels, or just play basic card or board games, or read the news form different areas of the world online, while a younger user may want to play action games with complex graphics or download many songs from Internet sites. When working on the computer, our actions are guided with programs. For the first user a good Word processor and Internet access will meet the basic needs. The need for huge amounts of storage is not of great importance. The computer uses a hard drive to store information. The more information that is going to be stored or the more programs that will be used increases the amount of storage required. To compare the two possible users let's look at how storage is counted.

The computer handles information in the form of bits that are basically just an on-off signal. Combinations of these signals tell the computer what to do. Each command or character within a program is represented by a series of these signals. The computer reads these signals off of the hard drive and interprets them for what action it is required to do. The progression of counting these bits is as follow:

Byte

Kilobyte Kb

Megabyte Mb

Gigabyte - Gb

Terabyte

8 bits

1000 bytes

1000 Kb

1000 Mb

1000 Gb

How does that affect you? When typing a letter, the computer looks at each character in a format know as ASCII code in which each letter, number, or character is represented to the computer as one byte. This increases as special characteristics or letter styles are added to the basic letter. The letter styles are referred to as FONTS. Some fonts are rather fancy and require the computer to have quite a bit more information about the letter to display it properly. If you type a book into your word processor program with just a basic letter style and not other special characteristics i.e. bold or Italics, on an average it would require app. 1.4Mb of storage space for the entire book. Typing the same book with fancy fonts and special characteristics may take up to 3 times that amount. What that means in the requirements of storage is that you could write over 250 books, save them on your computer and still use less than 1Gb of storage.

Computer programs are quite a bit more complex than just a written book. Most of them use more than 8 bits to represent a single character and commands are made up of strings of these characters, with the program having maybe millions of commands to control how the computer performs your actions. The typical word processing program will require app. 350Mb of storage to hold all the commands that allow you to type your book. The word processor normally will provide you with a spell checker, thesaurus, and grammar check, not only in English but often many foreign languages as well. It will also allow you to access and change the font of the characters you type.

A basic system now includes at least a 40Gb drive. The programs that are normally preloaded on a computer now take up a total of app. 4-6Gb of the hard drive space. This leaves plenty of room for expansion of programs and storage of your books. This would work fine for the first user. If adding quality programs for working with pictures you will find that they are both expensive and will take up as much as twice the space of a word processing programs. The same applies to working with sound or music files on your computer. You will also find that music files and picture files can be quite large. A music CD loaded to your computer can take anywhere from 50Mb to 500Mb depending on the playback quality you desire or the format in which they are stored. A picture taken with the average digital camera at its highest quality can take up to 30Mb for a single image. There are means of reducing these images in size and maintaining most of the quality but pictures can still accumulate and take up a lot of computer storage space. A young user of a computer may want to have 1000 songs on the computer to load to portable players or just to listen to through the computer. Depending on the quality and length of the songs this could eat up 5-10Gb of storage or even more. 1000 pictures even compressed to save space could take upwards of 2Gb. Along with the storage of the music or images the programs to work with them that also eat up storage space. Working with videos requires even more space. So if several people with these types of interests will be using the computer you want to be sure to have a large hard drive.

The next consideration has to be RAM. The easiest way to explain RAM is to look at it as a scratch pad. This is the working memory of the computer. It uses it the same way you would use a scratch pad. And as you know it is easier to keep working on different things if you have a large scratch pad as apposed to a 3x5 card. The computer keeps a lot of program and file information in RAM while working. It pulls the information up from the hard drive and works on it then replaces it. If it has to keep going back to the hard drive for supporting information to work on the file it slows down. An increased amount of RAM allows the computer to reference the hard drive less frequently. Most computers now come with 512Mb of RAM to start with. However, if the users are going to do a lot of graphics or music works with the computer it is recommended that you get as much RAM as possible remembering that you are often working with large files and programs. This also comes into play with the highly graphics intense games that need a lot of RAM to play smoothly.

Next, with the new computers you will see references to a CD drive. A novice might ask, "What do I need a CD for?" Although you can use your music CD's in these drives the primary purpose of the drive is for programs. These drives are used to load/install new programs to the computer when you buy them. You will see these drives referred to as CD, CD-R, CDR/RW, DVD/CD-R or other combinations of these. Basically this mean it is either just a player for playing music or loading programs, or it is capable of not only reading information from the CD but also able to record to a blank CD. CD-R/RW means that with the right discs you can record over the CD. DVD is just what it may seem to be, a player that allows you to watch a DVD on your computer. While you may not think about watching a movie on your computer now, as the Internet advances, the means installed in the computer that allow you to watch the DVD will also be used to watch movies on the Internet. You can also get a DVD drive on your computer that allows you to record your own home movies. The younger user may want to download many songs from the Internet and copy them onto a CD in the order that they would like to hear them as well as mixing and matching artist. The photo buff may want to store their pictures on CD's to keep from flooding their hard drive space. The novelist may want to take their finished books and archive them to a CD so they are not accessible to anyone else that may use the computer.

When looking for a new computer you will see references to GHz. This is a speed rating for the computer. Remembering the huge size of programs with millions of commands, this speed rating determines how fast the computer can process what it needs of those commands in keeping pace with what you are doing. The higher the GHz rating, the faster the computer can perform. For someone that just wants to type letters this is not a factor as there is no one that can type faster than the modern computer can process. However, the user that wants to work with large pictures, large music files, videos, or animations will find that speed can be a factor. A good way to look at it is that if the computer is going to put money in your pocket, go with the fastest you can. If it is not then why pay more for a speed that is not so important. When working with animations the computer has to do millions of calculations. A 30 second animation will normally consist of app. 600 images. The computer has to calculate the changing of millions of colors from one image to the next to create and display the apparent motion. This takes time even on the fastest of computers but the faster the computer the less time it takes.

The monitor or display is an IMPORTANT factor to take into consideration. This is what you will be looking at no matter what you are doing on the computer. If you get a monitor that is hard on your eyes you will not enjoy your time on the computer. The regular monitor and the flat-screen are the two basic types. The regular monitors are usually a little better on the eyes and use a tube technology similar to a TV but with more detail control. However, you will find some flat-screen monitors that give just as good an image. The advantage of the flat-screen monitors is space saving. They are also available in a wider format that will let you view widescreen DVD's in their intended format. Whichever monitor you chose, you should always look at the samples set up in the stores to see if the screen image is comfortable to you. If your decision is to purchase a computer from company over the Internet, you should first get the specifications for the monitor included and take those with you to a local computer store. Find a monitor on display that matches those specs and be sure that the image is easy on your eyes, if not then go with a better quality monitor. If you are planning on a flat-screen monitor for a home computer be sure that you can see the image on the display from a wider angle than just a straight on view.

You will then have to consider again what you want the computer for. If basic use then you can get an all-in-one printer/scanner/fax. If you are planning on working with a lot of scanning you may want to separate these items. The worst thing that can happen is that you find you want to scan a picture into the computer to send to a friend or work with, but you can't because your printer broke and the whole unit is in for repair. Additionally, you can purchase a digital camera for taking pictures and inputting them directly to your computer. If you plan on doing a lot of black and white text documents you may want to get a laser printer as apposed to an inkjet printer. Black and white volume is cheaper in the long run with a laser printer. On the average inkjet printer you will get app. 300-500 pages of text printing and the cartridges will run about $20. A laser printer will give you app.10 times the number of pages with an average cost of $60 for cartridges A warning to heed is that if you want to print color pictures it can get expensive. Color cartridges cost more than the black cartridges. If you decide on a color inkjet you then need to check out how the color cartridges are packaged. Most will have a single color cartridge that contains the 3 base colors. With these, if you run out of one color the whole cartridge has to be replaced. There are also available color inkjet printers that have the color divided into three separate cartridges so if you run out of one color you just replace that single cartridge instead of all the colors. The individual cartridges will cost less than the mixed but are also sometimes harder to find. If you are not going to do a lot of printing then a color inkjet printer is nice because it will allow you the option of printing color when you want. If you want the highest quality of color printing and large volume of black and white you will need to go with a color laser that will cost you as much as the rest of your computer combined.

You will find that for a basic user or couple you can get a computer that will meet your needs including printing for about $600. For a family with a wide variety of interest you will probably want to add to the basic system until your price rises upwards of the $2000 range. A large family may find it cheaper to get more than one mid-range computer and separate the uses rather than try to share all interest on one computer. If you are a novice user be sure to allow in your budgeting for someone to come to your home to show you how to set up your computer get connected to the Internet and at least the basics of using the computer. In the long run this will more than pay dividends in your enjoyment. You don't want to spend the money to buy a computer and then get so frustrated with it that it just sits and collects dust for years.

The final option to consider is whether you are really space restricted or if you need portability in your computer. If this is your situation you may want to consider the purchase of a laptop computer. Laptop computers can have almost the same capabilities as a full sized desktop computer. However, you will find that to have those same capabilities will cost you considerably more for example the $600 desktop version mentioned earlier may cost $1200 in a laptop. If you decide on a laptop be aware that you may find the keyboard size and layout a little difficult to use as well as the built in mouse or touchpad. You can plug into the laptop a full sized keyboard and mouse if needed. Quite a few of the newer laptops have available accessories such as a docking station. What this will allow you to do is have the portability for travel and then while at home the advantages of a full sized keyboard, mouse, and monitor provided that you buy the additional monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

Larry Traub prepared this brief buyer's guide. Larry Traub is a retired U.S. Marine Corps Computer Technician/Instructor. After the Marine Corps Larry worked in computer sales for 2 years at Circuit City. Since 1996 Larry has been providing in-home training on computers. Larry is familiar with and able to teach most programs available for the home or small office user to include: accounting software, word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and photo handling. He is also familiar with many of the higher end graphics and music programs. If you would like additional assistance with either the purchase of your computer or learning to use it, he can be contacted via email at larryt6@cox.net or by phone at 702-871-6888.


GLOSSARY

RAM

Random Access Memory - This is the scratch pad that the computer uses to work with. The amount of RAM contributes to how fast the computer can work and how much it can do at one time.

Hard drive

This is where the computer stores information such as programs for the operations the user wants to do. The larger the hard drive the more information and programs it can hold.

CD-R

Compact Disc Recorder -- This device will play Compact Disc or allow the user to record either their data or music files for permanent storage.

CD-RW

Compact Disc Rewritable - This device will allow, with the proper type of compact disc, the user to record information and then to overwrite that same information. Usually restricted to being re-accessed from the same drive or at least the same software version for another drive.

SOFTWARE

These are the programs that a person would use to complete some particular task ranging from things to do list and addresses to movie animation or space exploration.

INTERNET

This is the world provided to you in the comfort of you home. Here you can find anything from recipes to views of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem or the Ski slopes around the globe. You can see live news broadcasts or check out your medical symptoms. You can buy a new hat or a new castle or even a pet.

DVD

This can be either a player or recorder that will allow you to watch your favorite movie on the computer or save your videos from your family vacation to a format that you can watch on your TV with your home DVD player.

DPI

Dots per inch - This term determines how good the quality of your printed image will be. The higher the dpi the closer the dots of ink that form the image whether it is black text or color pictures. The closer the dots the sharper will be your image.

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