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Re: [LUG] New computer: RAM, CPU

 

On Tue, 19 May 2009, Martijn Grooten wrote:

> Hello.
>
> It's that time where I'm going to buy a new computer and I realised I
> have little idea about how much memory and how fast a processor is
> needed these days. I've bought some servers for work recently and
> compared to shose all desktops seem very slow and rather low on
> memory, but then, this home computer is going to run neither a mail
> server nor a web server. Just a dual boot Kubuntu and Vista, that will
> mainly be used for web browsing, office stuff and some photo editing.
> But it'd be nice if it were good enough to survive the next version of
> either operating system too.

The key thing is knowing what you want to do with it.

Personally, I like building my own - but this isn't for everyone (and 
sometimes not always the cheapest option these days either )-:

My current desktop is a dual-core Atom processor @ 1.6GHz with 2GB of RAM. 
Runs more than adequately for what I do. (Linux only) If I were a "gamer" 
though, it probably wouldn't be adequate though! It runs fine for the 
tasks you mention - although I tend to use Latex more and more instead of 
Openoffice for letters, etc. GIMP is great. Firefox is OK but the supplied 
one with Debian still has the slow javascript engine.

So if not a demanding user, I'd buy it on price set an upper price limit 
and stick to it. I may be tempted to sacrifice a top-end processor for 
more memory though.

Gordon

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