Shopping for a new PC can be (trivial) tricky. Unlike shopping for a home appliance or personal gadgets, PC shopping takes a lot of thinking and considerations. This owes to the fact that PCs are still general-purpose machine.
When we buy a cellular phone, it is always assumed that it will be used for communicating and 99.9% of the time it can function as such. When we buy a personal computer, we cannot just buy any computer. We cannot use a home PC for extreme gaming unless we set it up as such.
We have to consider its purpose. Sure, we can just buy the one with all the latest component hardware but for most of us with budget constraints it doesn’t work that way.
A home computer meant for web surfing, emailing, blogging, chatting and occasional word processing will require fewer resources, will need minimum hardware requirements and, thus, will be cheaper. A work computer that will be use for heavy word processing and spreadsheet work will need a little bit of brain and muscle but an office computer which will be used as an office equipment for tasks like invoicing may require less resources. A computer that will be used by a computer programmer, graphics designer should have adequate processor speed and memory size as they are frequently using multiple applications at once. The PC that will be used for gaming will need all the resources it can have to be able to deliver that out-of-this-world experience. Gaming PCs are the most expensive computer for the desktop.
What kind of a PC we will buy is also determined by our budget. Buying the most expensive gaming PC for emailing your sister abroad is way, way overkill and a big waste of money. When budget constrained but we need a spreadsheet, try to take away those components that are not necessary. We don’t need graphics card and sound when doing spreadsheets. Right? Or we can wait until the price drop.
So, who’s going to use the PC? If the user will be a teenager, we’ll most likely consider buying a decent one. These people are doing a lot of things to entertain themselves and they want it fast. But gandma or grandpa doesn’t care if the PC delays a minute or two to boot.
Another thing to consider when buying a new PC is seller/technical support. One way or another your PC will experience trouble sooner or later, that is just how computers work, they give us headaches. How long can the seller provide warranty ““ if they actually provide one — on the unit matters a lot. The manner they provide support is another. So, be careful or you’ll end up with days without a PC to use.
This is by no means complete. If you have other considerations to add, use the comment section.