My five-year-old desktop PC has died, and I want to buy something new. I am confused that, in some brands, there seem to be more Celerons than Pentium 4 chips. What should I be looking for? Gordon Murray
PCs are now so fast that almost any machine will perform well for general purpose computing, assuming it has enough memory. Windows XP SP2 will run in 128 megabytes, but 256MB is now a practical minimum, and 512MB or more is recommended. People doing heavyweight tasks such as movie editing and professional desktop publishing often go for 2GB.
Memory is also crucial to processor performance, and in general, faster Intel chips have more built-in cache memory. Celerons have least, and Xeons have most, with Pentiums in the middle. Intel sells the Celeron line as a budget version of the Pentium, and sometimes errs by making the chips either not powerful enough or too powerful. Today's Celeron D 336 is slower than a Pentium 4 but reasonable value for most purposes, apart from serious gaming. See http://theinquirer.net/?article=26628 for more information (which includes AMD chips).
The cheapest PCs are built down to a price, and often economise by using motherboards with built-in sound and graphics. These are certainly good enough for most business purposes, but if you are planning to use your PC for entertainment, it's worth getting one with separate sound and graphics cards - and it may be worth paying a bit extra for better loudspeakers. (Vista, the next version of Windows, needs a 3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 9 and a recommended 128MB of memory for the full Aero Glass user interface.)
Another thing that makes a big difference is the size and quality of the screen. A PC becomes much more usable if you can have multiple programs spread out, and movies, of course, look much more impressive. The arrival of mass-market LCDs means big screens no longer take up a ridiculous amount of space, so get the biggest and sharpest you can afford. To make maximum use of your screen, add a Freeview TV tuner card.
