Sunday, January 3, 2010

Which is more important in the purchase; processor, memory or hard drive?




Regardless if you are looking for a laptop or desktop, one of the fist choices you will be confronted with will be what processor to choose.  Go to Dell and the first real decision you will have to make is what processor do you want to for your computer.  You should note that 9 times out of 10, the “recommended” one will be an upgrade from the base price the site first showed you.

I’m a basic type of guy, but this is one area you should always spend the money!  There will be many choices along the way to configuring or selecting your new laptop or desktop. Few of the decisions will impact your short and long term satisfaction of  purchase more than the processor selection.

The processor, for the most of us, is one part of the computer that your are stuck with after the purchase.  There is no inexpensive way to upgrade the processor after purchase.  Thats not the same case for memory (RAM) or hard drives.  You will be much better served to splurge on the processor even if that means you will have to go with minimums in every other selection.

Memory and storage are cheap when you buy the computer and guess what, they are cheap when you want to upgrade your computer down the road.  Not to mention the fact that most users can make these upgrades themselves.  Sure changing an internal hard drive isn’t the easiest thing to do; so buy an external one.  Many, if not most, external hard drives are “plug and play” so to speak. Meaning just plug it into the USB port and the computer will walk you thru the setup.  Its no more complicated than a thumb drive.

So when picking out that new computer, spend an extra minute looking at the processor and spend the money there instead of 6 GB of RAM or that 500 GB hard drive.  You’ll be glad you did! 

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