What do you (actually) need?

What you should pay

The Bang and bucks table below takes a stab at identifying roughly what level of pricing and sophistication you need for your tasks. Of course the salesman wants you to buy the latest with the most, but do you need all that for what you do? There's no point in buying a racing car to pick up groceries.

What you need for what you do

The Checklist on the Components page is a run down of  the parts that should be in the computer you buy.

Computer pricing continues to change at a fast pace. You'll pay less for much more processing power than you did even six months ago. But the demands of today's high end programs (like PhotoShop or video software) have kept pace with processing power, so that you need more from your computer to make today's programs run smoothly.

And our expectations have risen along with the speed of the hardware. Where we used to be happy to get a word processor to draw a box around a paragraph, we might now want to process a color photo of the family for our yearly Christmas mailing.

These prices are for complete systems as listed in the following table. If you see a price that seems too good to be true, look at what it includes. chances are that there is no monitor, modem, or other necessary components in the checklist.

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Bang and bucks table

Tasks	System level	Price range	Comments
Fine for basic word processing and spreadsheets, some web surfing	Level 1: Low-end	Cheap: Less than $1000.	Can't expand for future needs; slow for some Internet tasks, poor graphics performance
Word processing and spreadsheets with graphics, charts, and tables, web surfing	Level 2: Mid-level	Well-priced: $1000-1,600	A work-horse
Intensive graphics processing (PhotoShop), web surfing	Level 3: Higher-end	Getting up: $1,600-2,500	Fast, adaptable
Multimedia (video, sound and graphics), high-end websites, games	Level 4: High-end	$2,500-?	Fast; a lot of memory and storage

Price ranges are estimates, based on recent figures in national computer magazines. Models in these ranges change virtually weekly. You'll see the numbers attached to the levels again when you get to the Components page.

You'll notice that the Internet has only come up once. That's because even relatively slow computers can handle the low-speed phone connections that enable most of us to connect to the Internet.

If you are after a faster connection, you probably don't need to be reading this.

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Planning ahead

When you think about buying a computer, think about what you might want to do, not just what you do now. You may be doing simple memos now, but can you see yourself doing more in six months? Here are some scenarios (all real, by the way):

You came to a scanner workshop and would really like to take those old photos of the kids and make an album to view on-line. You've seen a friend with a keyboard that plugs into her computer. She composes music by playing the keyboard and having a program write it out in musical notation. You belong to an investment club, and have been talking about a newsletter. You like the idea of getting one together.... Your department needs to advertise its courses. As chair, you'd like to put out a brochure.

If these examples strike a spark, you may want to consider at least a mid-level computer. Of course, then you might feel obligated to actually start a new project.

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