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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Based on what we said last night we are still extremely happy with our pick. We are excited to have Yaroslav and his family here visiting us in Los Angeles. We think our future is extremely bright and based on our pick last night we are going to have a fine player whenever we choose to bring him over here. We love the direction of our team and we are excited about both Yaroslav and Daniel Ewing. I think that both players have a chance to come in and help us.”

What are your plans for Yaroslav between now and the time of your decision? “The thought is basically that while he is here he’s going to get together with our strength and conditioning coach where we will evaluate him and get a program for him to start on. He will then go back home and play for the Russian National Team over the summer and after that we will try to get some time for him to come over here and work out with our players. There are certain things we have talked about that I would like to see him do in his national games that will help us further evaluate him. These are things that we look for in all players. On a defensive standpoint and in reality against his opponents he is a good defender. He reads passing lanes very well, he knows the press, he has a high i.q., he gets his hands on a lot of balls, he blocks shots from the weak side, and in their league players are allowed to be posted up easily so we just need to work on battling a little bit. I have only seen him play against two guys that I thought were high competition for him and in both cases he performed very well. This led me to believe that he floats a little bit and he raises his level of play according to his competition’s level of play. I have told him to disregard that and just lock people down. Most of the time during his games due to his ability and his team’s ability they’re ahead by a good margin very quickly and therefore the defense can be blasé. In the couple games I saw him play his defense was pretty good. I saw him play against a guard who is good off the dribble and at that point in time he did very well staying in front of the guy. He has shown me glimpses of his ability and it just needs to be seen on a more regular basis. If his mental toughness and his ability to focus are good than he could be playing here next year.”

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.