Other Considerations
USB/FireWire Ports
USB and FireWire are both interfaces for connecting devices to your computer. The most common types of connectors that are used are shown below.
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USB |
FireWire |
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The number of each type that you need will depend on what devices (keyboard, mouse, printers, scanners, game controllers, external disks, cameras, iPods etc.) you intended connecting to your computer, and what type of interface each of these devices supports.
Screen Size
This is largely a matter of personal preference. For both laptops and desktops, the cost can increase significantly as the screen size increases, so make sure you're not paying for more than you need. Larger screen sizes can also make laptops heavy and unwieldy, which makes it more difficult to carry them around.
Optical Disk Drive
Optical disk drives can read from and write to various types of optical disks - CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. With the exception of netbooks, where compromises have to be made to save on size and weight, almost all new computers will come with a drive which is capable of reading and writing CDs, and reading DVDs. Many will come with drives which are also capable of writing DVDs. AT this time, drives capable of reading and writing Blu-Ray disks tend to be optional extras on mainstream computers.
It is often useful to be able to write information to DVD (for backup etc.), so you should consider a drive capable of writing DVDs. Whether you want to go the next step and pay the extra for a Blu-Ray drive will depend on budget and how quickly you think you're likely to transition to Blu-Ray.
One source of confusion with DVD drives is that there are many different DVD formats - DVD-R and DVD+R for recordable disks (disks that can be recorded on once), DVD-RW and DVD+RW for re-writable disks (disks that can be recorded on multiple times), DVD-R DL and DVD+R DL for dual-layer recordable disks which can accommodate up to 8.5 GB of data. It's worth checking the particular DVD formats which a DVD writer supports, just to make sure you knwo what you're getting.
Video/Graphics Cards
A computer may come with either an ntegrated graphics processor or a separate video/graphics card. An integrated graphics processor is a graphics chip that's part of the computer's motherboard. A video/graphics card performs the same function but resides on a separate card which connects to the motherboard. Whereas an integrated processor shares the system RAM, a standalone card will have it's own dedicated, high-speed memory (typically ranging from 128MB up to 2 GB, depending on the card) for graphics operations, thus improving performance.
Unless you're doing intensive graphics work (high-end gaming, graphic design, video editing etc.), you probably don't need to worry too much about the graphics card. If you are doing this type of work though, then you'll definitely want a standalone card.
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