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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The Portland Trail Blazers have exercised the team’s option to extend the contract of General Manager John Nash . The sixth GM in Trail Blazers history, Nash oversees the day-to-day basketball operations and is responsible for all player personnel decisions.

“We are very pleased to announce that John Nash will continue to be the General Manager of the Trail Blazers organization,” said team President Steve Patterson . “In his role, John is the chief architect of our club. We recognize that this is a very important offseason for our franchise and John gives us the continuity that will help us achieve the vision for our basketball team.

We are excited about the young core of our team and they achieved tremendous growth and gained invaluable experience this past season. As we evaluate every possible opportunity to complement what we have started, I am confident that John’s leadership on the basketball operations side of our organization will allow us to successfully turn our team around.”

While with the Trail Blazers, Nash engineered the trade with Atlanta for Theo Ratliff and Shareef Abdur-Rahim and a draft-night deal with New Jersey that netted Viktor Khryapa. He was instrumental in drafting Sebastian Telfair, Sergei Monia and Ha Seung Jin in 2004, and was also responsible for the free agent signing of center Joel Przybilla, who finished the season as the NBA’s 7th leading shot blocker.

“Under the ownership of Paul Allen and the leadership of President Steve Patterson, I am very confident that we will achieve our organizational goals of assembling a winning franchise and putting a team on the floor that the people of Portland can be proud of each and every night,” said Nash. “I am excited to finish what we have started the past two seasons and we will explore every opportunity to return the Trail Blazers to the playoffs.”

Before coming to Portland in 2003, Nash served as a color analyst for Comcast sports for two years. Prior to his stint at Comcast, Nash spent 15 years as a general manager in the NBA. During his almost two decades in the front office, Nash garnered a reputation as a knowledgeable and trusted talent evaluator when acquiring players. Nash most recently held the general manager post for the New Jersey Nets from 1996 - 2001. During that time he made four major multi-player trades and also added power forward Kenyon Martin in an attempt to bolster the Nets roster.

Prior to the Nets, Nash spent six seasons with the Washington Bullets/Wizards. Nash showed why he is well regarded as a talent evaluator in the league by plucking future NBA All-Stars Juwan Howard, Rasheed Wallace, Calbert Cheaney and Tom Gugliotta from the NBA draft and trading for Chris Webber and Hersey Hawkins. Nash got his start as a GM during a nine-year stint with the Philadelphia 76ers that was highlighted by a World Championship in 1983.

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.