Advice and Deals on Desktop Computer Systems

There are some great deals and rebates available on desktop computers from HP, Sony, IBM, Dell and more. Before getting into the deals, let me give some basic desktop computer advice on the parts and brands to choose for the best desktop configuration.

A desktop computer is designed for home or office use. Desktop computers come with the tower (containing at least a hard drive, floppy drive, and/or CD drive), keyboard, and mouse. Sometimes a monitor is also bundled with the system.

Here is my advice on what to look for in a desktop:

• CPU

  The CPU or processor to get depends entirely on what applications you plan on running. For word processing or web browsing, you can go with a cheaper CPU. They usually have a single core or less cache. For software or web development, video/multimedia editing or gaming, you want to go with the faster CPU.

• Hard Drive

  I recommend a 500GB or larger hard drive. Even though you will probably not use half the space, hard drives are cheap these days so going with a larger one will not add much to the cost.

• Other Drives

  CD/DVD/CD-RW/DVD-RW drive - For loading software, watching movies and recording to CD and DVD media. You can have all these features in 1 drive.

  Floppy drive - Yes, they are still being sold. Although they are not the fastest or spacious, I still find floppies to be useful in emergency situations like hard drive crashes. I guess there are so many 1.44MB disks floating around that it is hard to get rid of them.

• Memory

  I recommend 1GB or more.

• Monitor Size/Type
  

  Most desktop systems do not come with a monitor, but if one does, see my page on displays for some advice.

• Video Card

  If you do gaming, look for a video card with at least 256MB of video memory. Also, avoid desktops that use shared memory for video. If you are not into games, then any video card is fine.

Some of the good brands out there are HP, IBM, Sony and Dell. I have examined all these systems and have found them to be very good in their choice of parts.

The only brand I do not recommend is eMachines. They are priced cheap, but you are getting what you pay for. Sometimes they are not optimally configured and need an upgrade, but the upgrade itself can be difficult with these systems.