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.

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I’m sitting here watching Game 3 of the Miami – Washington series as I write this column and am amazed that it’s actually a good game – the Wiz are up by two at halftime. Oh, by the way, Shaq didn’t suit up for the game. This might actually turn out to be a competitive series if Shaq doesn’t play the rest of it…and Ashton Kutcher might have actually won an Oscar if he had any talent.

But I digress. Was it just me or was the first round of the playoffs great? Not to bring up the old stuff, but other than the Rockets losing in Game 7 to the Mavs and the Celtics rolling over and dying after blowing out Indiana in Game 1 (of course the abysmal discrepancy in free throws during that series might have had something to do with it as well), there were no major surprises in the first round. Yours truly went 6-2 on my First Round predictions…I’ll take that any day.

While I’m just about as sad that the Rockets lost Game 7 as when Pam Anderson decided to leave the cast of /Baywatch/ (a sad, sad day in television history), I must say, the potential I saw in Yao, Tracy and the rest of the Rockets team has me very much looking forward to the 2005-06 season.

Oh, one last thing before we get to the Top 10 list. The Rockets season might be over, but that doesn’t mean that The Database Guy (yes, I just referred to myself in the third person) is taking any time off. No, you won’t find me going off to Tahiti this summer to warm my buns and drink frozen drinks with little umbrellas in them (have fun Cat and Steve). I plan on staying in Houston, working on my office tan and cranking out new Top 10 lists for all of my devoted readers. Be looking for some fun, random columns this summer like the Top 10 NBA Players Most Likely to Play Themselves in NBA Live, the Top 10 Things Shaq Might Do in the Off-season, and a few columns devoted strictly to one of my favorite topics: movies. If you have any suggestions, send them to dbguy@rocketball.com

Now on to the Top 10 List: Being that there are still three more rounds in the NBA playoffs, I’ve decided to give you my Top 10 predictions for the rest of the 2005 NBA Playoffs. Enjoy.

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.