Many people do not realize how important are the components in a computer. Almost every computer setup can do almost every job thrown at it, the tricky part when it comes to buying computers is to know what component should be emphasized to suit you and your purpose.

The First Thing You Need To Know : Your Budget

Without knowing your budget, the sky’s the limit.

You need to decide on how much you are willing to part with, say RM 3,000? Then you need to decide whether or not you wish to max out the budget or try minimize the spending? eg, you allow up to RM 3,000 but would prefer to spend as little as possible. That’s actually a better move, personally I would recommend people to spend for what they need.

The Second Thing You Need To Know : Your Purpose

Yup. Which is why you need to know all those details before embarking on a purchase.

It doesn’t matter if it was a desktop PC, or a notebook / netbook / nettop or whatever else – you need to know what you’re going to do with the goods. In fact, knowing what you need is the factor that actually decides between a desktop or a mobile computer. For example, if you need mobility then desktop PC is out of your buying options already.

You need to identify your purpose. If it’s work, what kind of work application are you referring to? Microsoft Office? or some Audio / Video encoding work? If it was games, what games do you play? And are you one who craves graphic details or don’t mind whatever you get as long as you can play the game?

Inside Matters

As you can see. The inside of a computer matters, however the degree of how it affects you really depends on what your purpose is.

For example, getting an “Intel Atom” based computer would give you far weaker performance compared to an “Intel Core i7″ based computer but the “Intel Atom” setup would be less costly to setup and consumes much less power. There’s a setup for every purpose, going “Intel Atom” for video encoding is like getting a super model to do construction work. On the other hand, getting “Intel Core i7″ just for web browsing, replying E-mails and using Microsoft Word would be like getting a body builder to do sewing.

And guess what, the example above is just for the processor part alone! I’ll spare you the details for now as going through every single bit will take ages so I’ll put it in a more simple way – for X amount of money, you could choose which part of the component to allocate most of your budget on so that the computer would be better suited for your purpose. (more details towards the end of the article).

* More details on the Intel Atom – it’s a low power consumption processor, great for low power consumption setup. I’ll be having more reviews on products that uses the Intel Atom processor. See if you can spot them in the coming months.

Being Realistic

You can’t set a low budget to get high performance. It doesn’t work that way.

It’s like saying I don’t wish to spend more than RM 50,000 on a car and that car has to be able to do 250kph on the highway, must have awesome sound insulation, sound system that wakes the neighborhood, has a jacuzzi within and the boot space big enough to rear chicken.

Spend Wisely, Buy Wisely

Hey, rejoice that you have places like goldfries.com where you can seek opinion before going on with your purchase. I get a lot of enquiries via E-mail, Forum and Instant Messengers (Yahoo and Windows Live), feels free to add to the statistic if you have any questions.

I hope this article brought more enlightenment to you, do check out the ABOUT THE COMPUTER series that I wrote. It’s not completed but I’m releasing the rest of the series soon enough. I’ll cover the components with greater detail in those articles.

About The Computer – Processors
About The Computer – Motherboards

And don’t forget the PC Buying Guide , it’s a great way to get a basic idea of what kind of specification you should get for your purse and also the estimated cost for such system.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Buying Guides, Computing & The Internet, PC Hardware Related. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.