Well Skiwillgee, I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a computer geek-geek but I’ve been around computers since they made their first debut into the public domain for which I had been waiting for several years before then because I had special interests at the time (astronomical and photographical). And many things have changed since then.

Where once we knew that basically a computer consisted of a motherboard (came to be known as a “mobo”), a central processing unit chip (CPU), a hard drive (HD) and a floppy (remember the tape recorders and the 5 1/2 “ diskets?). Today we are inundated by the influx of technology and data.

So it’s not as simple anymore and as years go by they get even more complicated until finally they become simple again…an invention may come along in the not too distant future where mobo,CPU, HD and most peripherals will be contained in a single chip. And all you need order is: “ I’ll take the Azure chip for now but the Crimerion chip looks good also”.

Anyway, the point of this is…I recently (late April) bought a Dell XPS720 dual core (32 bit), 2.66Ghz., 1333FSB, 4Mb cache, 4Gb. DDR2 SDRAM at 800 Mhz., 768MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX video card, two 500 Gb. Serial ATA (SATA) 7200RPM Hard drives w/16MB. Databurst cache and Windows XP Pro. Now, do you understand anything of what I just rattled off? Probably not. And that’s pretty much where I was when I went out to make the purchase. So…you need to freshen-up on your computerese before you go out to make a slaying.

A couple things I learned along the way…64 bit Quad core computing is attractive but not yet here. Not too many programs coming in to the 64 bit domain yet. And not too many using quad core processing power as of yet but it’s all just around the corner. You can use 32 bit OS in a 64 bit processor. All this probably nearer than cheap gas at the moment.

RAID drives…an excellent setup for business professionals and serious artists because of the redundancy backup issue. But as my Dell agent told me when I enquired into them for my system (which of course came highly recommended from Dell advertisement) he basically said that yes…you have two drives but they’re basically a mirror image of each other for backup purposes so if you buy 2-500 Gb drives you only really have one 500 Gb drive and he didn’t recommend I get them for if your system drops out once (and you have no UPS system) then you lose both anyway. But here is a touchy situation for I thought I would like to get the much sought after RAID drive system. I didn’t.

Looking at what I ordered above…all those specs, and I still have ton's of paperwork figuratively speaking, you need to familiarize yourself with at least the basics of those…what is quad core…dual core? What is FSB? What is DDR2 and SDRAM? What is SATA? What is databurst cache?

Finally I would like to say that coming from a long time using Windows Me which never failed me and I still have it on my old computer without fail I went for Windows XP over Vista which is plain to see but if I had to reorder my OS, after much research afterwards I would go with Windows 2K if you can get it over Windows XP. Research that to while you’er at it.

A few things to research:

FSB: Front Side bus: FSB connects the processor of your computer (CPU) to system memory.

DDR: Double Data Rate memory (the bottleneck unpluger as far as SDRAM and its cycles is concerned)…they come in different flavors (1,2,3 etc.).

From SRAM (Static RAM) to DRAM (Dynamic RAM…also asynchronous DRAM) SDRAM (Synchronous DRAM) all terms to become familiar with…at least for the moment when you need to buy your new system.

Many things to consider and yes, it’s a pain in the a... but just think of what you would be relearning!

A web site to check out for terms:

http://www.directron.com/upgrade.html

Best of luck with your new system.