[Leif]

I'm afraid I disagree with almost everything that Tannin says.

Tannin: "Don't buy a Pentium 4, with or without Hyperthreading. The old P4 was throughly trounced performance-wise by the now-defunct Athlon XP, and isn't even in the same race as the Athlon 64. They are very hot and not particularly quick and are well and truly on the way out now."

About 1 year ago I went for a P4 as there was not much in it, and several colleagues (fellow software engineers) did the same. If you have seen a hot machine, that is due to inadequate cooling. (That is one reason not to get a small size case.)

Tannin: "Don't trust the reviews you see in magazines. The computer press is on the whole dreadful, with a truly alarming level of ignorance amongst many computer journalists, and it is notorious for a near-universal practice of giving positive reviews to the companies that buy the most advertising, regardless of actual merit. Don't even read the computer press, never mind make buying decisions based on that fiction."

I don't know the Australian press, but the UK magazines are pretty good. The journalists on magazines such as PC Pro and PC World seem to know their stuff. The tests are thorough, using standardised methods to stress a PC. The worst performers are usually the brands that appear on the high street. In addition they have user surveys, which give real world feedback about quality, support, reliability and so on.

Tannin: "Don't forget that different chips deliver different performance levels reardless of raw clock speed, which means that you can't assume that two different 3000MHz parts are equivalent - they can bbe a long, long way apart."

What matters is the overall system performance. There's no point in having a fast CPU if the memory is the bottleneck. Similarly the hard disk, motherboard, graphics card and chipset all play a role. That's why magazine performance tests are so useful. They tell us the strengths and weaknesses of a given machine. Why pay more money for high grade games performance when it is no faster at PhotoShop? (Unless you also play games.)

Tannin: "Don't ever, ever, ever buy a supermarket vomit box (Compaq, Acer, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, etc.). "

I have been working in IT currently as a consultant for 13 years and almost every company I have worked at buys Dell boxes. They have decent performance and reliability and I guess business support must be okay. I bought a Dell, and never again as the monitor arrived broken, and the support was appalling. However, most of my friends/colleagues buy Dell laptops and are very happy with them. They offer excellent performance for the money. They are not expensive to expand. Off the shelf components will do. Companies such as Crucial.com sell high quality memory at good prices. Compaq and HP are expensive IMO. Watford Electronics sell components at good prices (I live down the road from them!).

In the UK brands such as Carrera, Mesh and Aries get good feedback. As I say, check the magazine reviews and user surveys. My feeling is that companies such as Dell that assemble PC's to order are best as they do not sit on the shelves for any time, and so margins can be low. They also use the latest components.

As for the other jargon, you want a SATA hard disk (not the older PATA), and I would go for 200GB or more, and you want the more modern PCI Express graphics format. Also make sure that the motherboard can be expanded to at least 3 GB RAM and preferably 4 GB. Some motherboards only accept 2 GB. I think you should also get a DVD player and a DVD writer so that you can copy disks if need be.

You might want to consider backups. What do you do when the hard disk fails? Will you lose all your images? One solution is to use RAID with dual disks, whereby if one disk fails, the other contains a copy of the data. Or maybe an external USB hard drive with backup software. That will be my solution. The alternative is to use DVD's but it is tedious and they do not last indefinitely. I do not claim to be up on this issue.

Also I would recommend avoiding small format cases as they will limit your expansion possibilities.

One thing I will stress is do not spend money on a games machine, as you will be paying for expensive graphics performance that is not needed for PhotoShop etc. Unfortunately I cannot tell you which graphics cards to look for.

As for screens, well I use an old 19" Iiyama Vision Master Pro 450. I am not convinced that TFT is as good. And I only payed £60 for a used one.

Leif