A lot of people buy new computers and sometimes are not sure what they are actually buying with all the Giga bytes and RAM, This guide in simple terms will try and explain the meanings of each part of a computer to make it easier to know what you have or what you’re buying.
Processor
This is the heart of a computer, this runs all the tasks and is basically the main part of your computer, now you can either have a AMD or a PENTIUM these are the two most commonest processors on the market, then you have the type of processor such as PENTIUM 4, 3, Celeron, Xeon or Centrino on the other hand you could have AMD, Athalon there are more but you get the idea.
Now the power of the processor is determined in either GHz or MHz now this depends on how old your processor is, see mine is a PENTIUM 4 3.0 GHz which means 3.0 GHz so its pretty darn fast 3.0 GHz is equal to 3000 MHz. The higher the GHz or MHz the faster your computer is.
RAM
Random Access Memory, this is where data is stored while the computer is running and then when you turn of the computer it is deleted, its not a saving place more of a temporary storage area, you see instead of saving the data on the hard drive and having t find it all the time this makes the computer faster. Now we have different types of RAM there is SDRAM, DDR RAM or DDR 2 RAM. Now DDR is Double Data Rate basically 256 DDR RAM is twice as fast as SDRAM 256.
So the more RAM you have and the type will speed your computer up as well I have 1024 DDR RAM, this means that I have a fair amount of RAM to help my processor and speed the computer up.
Hard Drive
Now this is where all your data is stored and actually kept, your hard drive is the main storage area; data stored here is not deleted unless you decided to delete it.
The hard drive size is Giga bytes so my hard drive is 160 GB so it’s fairly big. Now the more GB your hard drive as the more memory you can store on your computer, bigger the better.
Graphics Cards
Now if you want to play the newest games or run heavy modelling or photo editing software you will need a powerful graphics card with RAM, graphics cards come in many different styles so what you want to look for is a respectable company such as NVIDIA or ATI and then a good RAM amount such as 256 DDR RAM this is a good card for any computer.
This is all I will be covering as these are the main aspects to look for other ones are the amount of USB ports, and PCI slots or AGP slots, that’s it folks have fun.
