Refurbished computers offer savings
COMPUTER TIPS COLUMN: By J. Jay Ossola, Feb. 26, 2004
Tax refund time is here and many students will be looking to make school supply purchases. One of the biggest expenses facing today’s student is an up-to-date computer system that will handle their school and personal needs.
While most people could simply upgrade their existing systems with more RAM, a larger monitor, or a DVD burner, a faster motherboard is the best upgrade for anyone and the most complicated.
The fastest motherboard speed is hovering around 3.4 GHz but that could change overnight. The most popular software in use today needs about 1-2 GHz to run properly with the exception of some video games. I chose to use the Intel Celeron motherboard as a base because it was designed for fast video playback and its dual independent bus, which makes for really quick retrieval of recently viewed documents.
The rest of the buying process is sitting down and figuring out what you need as opposed to what you would like to have. The best way to figure what your system minimums will be is to take a hard look at which applications you use the most. Video and graphic applications eat up enormous amounts of RAM as well as hard drive space. A good minimum to start off with is 512 MB of RAM and 40 GB of hard drive space.
Installing RAM is the easiest upgrade anyone could make, so when shopping for a computer put the RAM on hold and look at the price of the system being offered objectively.
The second easiest thing to install is the Operating System. Odds are that you already have a copy of Windows with your old computer, why pay for it again?
Just as important as having a workhorse of a computer system is having a warranty from a company you can trust. The bigger the name, the better you can sleep at night. You might have to wait on hold a little longer for a service rep but its better than finding out that the company you bought from went bankrupt.
Taking your average student into consideration, I delved into the world of computer shopping where there are hundreds of competitors trying to outdo each other. I found that the best deals are from the larger distributors like Dell and Gateway.
The old adage still rings true. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.