It is my personal opinion, most people spend way
too much
time comparison shopping for their next PC. When comparing
PCs
that are of the same type , the price difference is usually fifty
dollars or less. To be accurate in your comparison, you have to make
sure you are comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges.
You have to compare name brand PCs with name brand PCs and
white
box PCs with white box PCs. You have to make sure they have the same
manufacturer of CPU and the same speed. They have to have the same
amount of memory, hard drive space, accessories,warranty and shipping
cost.
A name brand PC with an Intel Pentium
4 3.0 GHz
CPU should cost around $550. It should have the following components:
Windows XP, 512 MB of RAM, CD/DVD Burner and a network card.
If you would like your new
PC to run Microsoft's new operating system
Windows
Vista,
the system would need at least 1 GB of RAM or preferably 2 GB of RAM.
The video card should have at least 128 MB of RAM, 256 MB
of RAM would be better.
One Last thought, as the cost of a PC
continues to
drop, the value of your data is going to be substantially more than
the cost of the PC. If you do not know how to set up your new PC
and move the data from the old PC to the new PC, you will need to hire
someone to do this. This can be a substantial cost in replacing your
old PC. I believe all home PC users should have an external USB hard
drive as a form of backup. You can find these usually on sale for
around $79 after rebates. Four years from now when you want to get your
next PC, it will be less time consuming and less costly moving your
data
to a new PC.
