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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Howard

Orlando’s Dwight Howard joined Emeka Okafor and Ben Gordon as unanimous selections to the got milk? NBA All-Rookie First Team as each received 58 points. They were joined on the First Team by Philadelphia’s Andre Iguodala (56 points) and Chicago’s Luol Deng (33 points).

Okafor, the second overall pick in the 2004 NBA Draft, led all rookies in scoring (15.1 ppg), rebounds (10.9 rpg) and minutes played (35.6 mpg) and ranked second in blocks (1.71 bpg). He ranked fourth in the NBA and first among rookies with 47 double-doubles (points-rebounds), posting 19 consecutive from November 21 to January 1.

Gordon, a three-time recipient of the got milk? Rookie of the Month award, averaged 15.1 points on .411 shooting from the field, 2.6 rebounds and 2.0 assists per game this season and scored 10 or more points in the final quarter 21 times. *Howard*, the first overall selection in the 2004 NBA Draft, ranked in the top five in six statistical categories, including second in rebounding (10.0 rpg) and double-doubles (32), third in scoring (12.0 ppg), blocks (1.66 bpg) and minutes played (32.6 mpg) and fourth in field goal percentage (.520). Iguodala, the only rookie to record a triple-double this season, ranked eighth in the league in steals per game (1.68), sixth in total steals (138) and steals per turnover (0.99). Deng averaged 11.7 points on .434 shooting, 5.3 rebounds and 2.2 assists in 61 games this season.

Nelson

The got milk? NBA All-Rookie Second Team consists of New Jersey’s Nenad Krstic (30 points), Atlanta’s Josh Smith (22 points) and Josh Childress (21 points), Orlando’s Jameer Nelson (20 points) and Boston’s Al Jefferson (17 points).

The voting panel consisted of the NBA’s 30 head coaches, who were asked to select five players for the first team and five players for the second team, regardless of position. Coaches were not permitted to vote for players on their own team. Two points were awarded for first team votes and one for second team votes.

The got milk? Milk Mustache campaign is sponsoring the NBA Rookie platform to highlight the importance of milk's bone-building calcium and eight other essential nutrients for active people, teens especially, who add about 15 percent of their height during these years. The platform includes the ‘got milk?’ Rookie Challenge, the ‘got milk?’ Rookie of the Month awards, the ‘got milk?’ Rookie of the Year award and the ‘got milk?’ All-Rookie Team

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.