I did post this to the link called buying a new computer, but I think that that link was over and done so no one looked at it!
I am looking to buy a new computer! I am going to stick with a PC, but what I am asking is what would be the minimum you would go with to do what we do! I use photo shop and want to play and do all that cool stuff you can do with graphics! I really would appreciate some advise here! I need to hear from the pros!
April

Don't go for the minimum. Graphic programs are very "CPU hungry" and they will only become more and more complex. You'll have to upgrade before you know it.

Look for a P4 processor, 3GHz, 800 MHz FSB, 512 MB DDR SDRAM. You should also look for a big hard drive to store all your graphics and pictues (at least 40 Gigs or better).

If you are not sure about what you need/want/can afford, e-mail customer service at Dell and tell them what you want to do with your PC. They'll tell you exactly what you should get at a price that you can afford.

HTH

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Jana
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Thanks Jana! This is a great help! I am so excited but I do want to go ahead and get it now so that I am not upgrading in a year! Great advise!
april

512 would be a minimum with PS ..id go for gig if at all possibel since it is a fair bit on teh cost but you wont regret it. 40GM to is a minimim especially if you have alot of programs on your computer. Id lean more towards 80gig as a minimum

Hope that helps

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If your machine has 2 slots and you go with the 512 RAM, be sure its only 1 - 512 card instead of 2 - 256 cards. That way when you are ready to upgrade, you don't have to dump one of the cards. At least that was how I felt when I realized that I had 2 - 256 cards. I was planning on 1.5gigs and ended up with 1.2gigs. I don't if it would have made that much difference having the extra 256.

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Betty

Also with the minimum level computers you might end up with an on-motherboard graphics card, which will take away computing power to run the graphics on screen - a separate graphics card will make everything else faster, especially when you want to work with graphics

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Thanks everyone! I think this info has really been benificial to me! You have mentioned things I really didn't think of! I am so glad I asked!
April

Well. it depends on what you are doing. Most onboard video cards these day are actually quite good (based on Gforce 3 or 4 chipsets) and will be perfectly fine for scrapbooking. If you are into 3D gaming or MMORPG's.. then you will need a dedicated video card. You can save some serious cash on using the onboard video.. having a fast (7200 rpm or SCSI RAID) hard drive and 1MB of memory is FAR more important and worth the extra $$ there. In any event.. you can always buy a video card later if you run into issues that overrides the onboard video. Take my advice.. you'll be fine (again unless you do some serious Far Cry game playing).. enjoy.