Expert: Bobbert - 3/26/2009

Question
We want to buy a desktop.  I use QuickBooks, run a small business that requires lots of word and excell document creation and storage, Photoshop and lots of photo storage.  My daughter is 13 and will be using it for homework and no doubt web exploration.  I need good protection of my information as well as to protect her from inappropriate viewing.  I want to spend as little as possible and am considering a refurbished Dell.  Do you recommend such a purchase?  I do not know how to compare the processors, their speeds, or the hard-drive information since they are sometimes MHz or FSB?  Not understanding makes it impossible to compare units.  Please help.  Thank you.

Answer
I would and wouldn't be worried about specifications, none of your application needs are "intensive", aside from needing a suitable amount of strage (whatever is "lots" to you, some users this can mean in excess of 10,000 GB, others it can mean a single 120GB drive), and being able to handle the weight of Photoshop (which is influenced by how complex your work with the application is).

As far as comparing processors, "their speeds" are misleading, as many manufacturers will love to provide you with their clockspeed (in Mhz or Ghz (Ghz being a larger order of magnitude of the same base unit (Hz), 1000MHz = 1Ghz)), and sometimes their Front-Side Bus speed (which refers to the switching speed of the interface between the CPU itself and the rest of the computer, however this data on its own is relatively worthless, as it doesn't take into account things like bus width (an analogy: just because you could type a single leter 1000 times a minute, doesn't mean you could type a full word, or full sentence, 1000 times a minute)). These specs also tell you nothing about the architectural specifics of a given processor (at this point we're borderlining on introductory Computer Science courses), for example CPU A may have a faster clock speed (meaning the device "switches" faster (like RPMs in your car's engine)), but CPU B may accomplish more work per cycle (for example a V12 compared to a V6).

Based on all of that, I generally don't advise users to get overly concerned with these details (As it can get quite dizzying to keep it all "nailed down", even for professionals), and suggest that as long as you keep the hardware "new enough", things should be "ok" (in a real world example, if you purchased a computer with an Intel Core 2 Duo, regardless of which model of Core 2 Duo, its going to handle everything you've told me you intend to run, and probably much, much more). If you're buying used or refurbished hardware, I would be very cautious to not buy something damaged or overpriced (used hardware can be excessively overpriced, due to the economics of IT hardware).

Now, the hard-drive comparison is quite simple, capacity is measured in GB or TB (TB being a larger order of magnitude than GB, 1024GB = 1TB (both are measures of Bytes)), "bigger" is more (640GB is twice the storage of 320GB, 320GB is twice the storage of 160GB, etc).


On the note of protection/security, I always advice that good browsing habits are 90% of the battle (for example, if you avoid P2P and other filesharing applications, don't click random links or banner ads, avoid "shady" websites, don't download unknown or random files, etc), aside from that, a good anti-virus suite, and decent web browser should be all you need. I would suggest Grisoft's AVG (free to home users), along with Safer-Networking's Spybot S&D (also free to home users), which will give you anti-virus and anti-spyware protection with no nonsense. I would also suggest a "secure" web browser (something that isn't pin-holed with exploits (for example Internet Explorer 6.0 would not be "secure" in my opinion, Opera 9.6 would be "secure"))



If you have any specific units in mind, feel free to ask, or if you have any more questions or need clarification, feel free to ask.

-bob