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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* April 20 (Ticker) *-- In a season of lows, a pair of Portland Trail Blazers ended the campaign with career highs.

*NBA TV highlights from Lakers-Blazers:* 300k

Travis Outlaw scored 20 points and rookie Ha Seung Jin added 13 as the Trail Blazers gave a glimpse of their future in a 106-103 victory over the Los Angeles Lakers.

With their worst record in 32 years, the Trail Blazers (27-55) missed the playoffs for the second straight season. In addition to a series of injuries to key players, coach Maurice Cheeks had a run-in with Darius Miles and was fired shortly thereafter.

But there appears to be hope for Portland. Shareef Abdur-Rahim, Damon Stoudamire and Nick Van Exel are free agents, giving the team approximately $40 million of salary cap relief. It has a proven young star in forward Zach Randolph and a deep core of energetic youngsters.

Two of those are Outlaw, a second-year forward drafted directly out of high school, and the 7-3, 305-pound Ha, a 19-year-old South Korean. Outlaw made 7-of-12 shots and 5-of-6 free throws and Ha made 6-of-7 shots and pulled down five rebounds.

Interim coach Kevin Pritchard also has been giving increased time to rookie guard Sebastian Telfair, who had 17 points and 11 assists, and rookie small forward Viktor Khryapa, who had eight points and seven boards.

All four were on the floor down the stretch. After Kobe Bryant scored seven straight points for the Lakers to give them a 101-100 lead with 3:22 to play, Ruben Patterson sank two free throws to give the Blazers the lead for good.

With 1:45 to go, Ha threw in a lefthanded follow shot for a 104-101 lead. Khryapa took a charge from Bryant, who drew a foul from Patterson on the next possession and made two free throws with 30 seconds left.

With the shot clock running down, Khryapa penetrated and fed Outlaw for a dunk with 7.1 seconds to play. The Russian rookie tied up Bryant and tipped the jump ball to Patterson, who dribbled out the clock.

Patterson scored 18 points for the Trail Blazers, who were 14 games worse than last season and finished below .500 for the first time in 15 years but avoided last place in the Northwest Division.

Bryant scored 37 points for the Lakers (34-48), who fell off 22 games from last season. After reaching the NBA Finals four times in five years, the Lakers missed the playoffs for the first time since 1994

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.