The processor or CPU is the heart of any computer and is what actually does the work within the computer. This is what truly divides the PC world as Apple and Windows computers use totally incompatible chips. Windows CPU come from a number of different manufacturers, the main ones being Intel and AMD, and in a number of different formats, for example Celeron, Pentium I, II, III etc. The chip designations are a source of confusion because some chips are designed with specific purposes and all can be run at different clock speeds. The clock speed is a reflection (though not an absolute guarantee) of the speed that the processor executes instructions. It is usually stated in Mega Hertz (MHz), therefore a 650MHz is slower than a 850MHz processor. Today we are seeing the advent of processors running in excess of 1GHz.

Click here for Denver Nuggets Tickets.

The odds are against him, but that’s not unlike his entire life. One could argue that others put up better numbers, but his stats are rather hard to ignore. And he plays a position – point guard – that’s only been recognized twice in the 22-year history of the award.

Either way, it doesn’t matter. He has his teammates’ vote, and that ultimately counts more than anything the media might think.

But Denver’s Earl Boykins is a front-running Sixth Man of the Year candidate, nonetheless. He has been the past two seasons, finishing seventh in the voting in 2003 (when Sacramento’s Bobby Jackson earned the honor) and fifth last year (Antawn Jamison). Only this season has been Boykins’ finest yet.

Boykins is one of the league's premier reserves.

(Joe Murphy/NBAE/Getty Images)

A year ago, his first with the Nuggets, he averaged 10.2 points and 3.6 assists in 22.5 minutes a game, all career-highs. He also shot 88 percent from the line. This year? He’s at 12.4 ppg, 4.4 apg, 26.3 mpg and 92 percent at the line.

All from the shortest (5-foot-5) and lightest (133 lbs.) player in the league.

There hasn’t been a more dependable Nugget this season. Denver’s win against New Orleans on April 13 was Boykins’ 228th consecutive game played, the fifth-longest current streak in the NBA. He’s hit 205 of his last 218 free throws (.940) and is the third-most accurate foul shooter in the NBA this season.

But in a league of giants, Boykins has especially stood out with time running out. Through April 13th, he’s sank 11 shots in the final five seconds of a quarter, and 16 in the final 10 seconds. And his most clutch performance ever came on Jan. 18 in Seattle. After scoring just three points in regulation, Boykins poured in an NBA-record 15 points in overtime to sink the Sonics, 116-110.

“At the end of a game, when (we are) behind, he has the ability to get open, which is hard to do in our game,” Nuggets head coach George Karl says. “And when (we are) ahead, you can’t stop him from getting the ball and he’s a great free-throw shooter.”

Boykins aspires to one day be a starter in the NBA. But for now, he signed with the Nuggets to be a backup and is more than content in his role. The spark he provides the moment he steps onto the court may be his most valuable asset to the Nuggets.

“That’s what he’s been doing since he’s been in the league: come in, give a spark, get the crowd into the game,” says Andre Miller, the man Boykins backs up. “The whole environment changes when he goes into the game.”

With his diminutive size, Boykins has an abundance of quickness.

“Every night I step on the court, I know that I’m going to be faster than at least eight other guys on the court,” he says. “There may be someone just as fast as I am, but nobody’s shown me any faster eight guys.”

He’s confident, too. Though one of the tinier players on every basketball team for which he’s ever played, Boykins always knew he’d be in the NBA. He realizes he’s blessed with an unbelievable talent.

For instance, at a recent Nuggets practice, the team’s guards split into two teams pitted against each other in a 3-point contest refereed by the team’s shooting specialist, assistant coach Chip Engelland. While teammates Wesley Person and Luis Flores struggled, Boykins carried his team by draining four in a row. “Y’all got one between the two of you,” Boykins playfully chided.

As the competition drew to a close, Engelland announced that the next basket would win. With victory on the line, Greg Buckner, shooting from the right corner, was off the mark. Flores, from the left corner, missed as well. But when Boykins received his pass from Engelland, he calmly swished the winner like there was never a doubt. No one was surprised.

The question you need to ask is how much this will affect your work. If you can type at speeds above 1GHz then you are superhuman, whereas some applications such as photo-retouching require alot of processing power and the speed of the processor will have an impact on how much work you can do.

Typically in adverts you will see the processor as the first line of any spec, for example:

The type and speed of processor you require is difficult and you should look at the package as a whole, for example it is not worth buying a very fast processor at the expense of having a smaller amount of RAM.

RAM stands for Random Access Memory and is what the computer uses to work with information, for example if you open a letter from a storage device (e.g. a disk) it will be copied to the machines RAM so that it can be worked on. RAM is installed into a PC using chips that contain a certain amount of RAM, which is why the amount of RAM you can install is governed by the size of chips that are compatible with your PC, i.e. if your PC accepts 64MB chips you can have configurations in multiples of 64MB, up to the maximum allowable number of chips.

As a guide 32MB is not enough, 64MB is just about acceptable for general office tasks, 128MB is recommended for most applications, 256MB is about as much as can usefully be used for many applications.

Hard Disks

Any PC needs a hard disk to store your documents and the applications that you use to create them. The bigger the disk, the more you can store. Most PCs now come with hard disks in Giga bytes (100MB) increments, for example a basic PC will have a 6GB hard disk. As a guide a letter in word format may take 20Kb to store whereas as an A4 picture could take up to 25MB of storage. The bigger the disk the more you can store. The cost of these storage devices is incremental, so only pay for what you need - and remember that if you have a huge disk and it breaks down, you will lose everything - so think about removable storage as well.

Removable storage refers to any media that can store information but can be physically removed from the computer. In the early days this was basically the floppy disk, but now a number of other options are available and some come as standard on new PCs. The most popular devices are made by iomega and are the Zip drives that come in 100MB and 250MB formats (this refers to the size of the removable disk). The advantage of these devices are that they can be used to regularly back-up your hard disk or transfer files to others (although they will also need a Zip drive). The other increasingly popular method of removable storage is the CD writer. These come from a number of manufacturers and allow you to create your own CDs that can be sent to others and used for backups. The downside of CD writers is that they are quite slow and are less flexible as you can typically only "burn" or write the CD once. There are also a number of different formats and this can lead to incompatibility with certain CD readers. The main advantage is that the media is very cheap. Typically a blank CD, purchased in bulk works out at below £1 for 650MB of storage, whereas a Zip 100MB cartridge may cost up to £7.