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Learn lingo before computer shopping

Friday | November 16, 2001 | 9:16 pm  

Edi­tors note: This is one of sev­eral columns that I wrote for the Colum­bia Mis­sourian. They were orig­i­nally called Your Dig­i­tal World

Soon, man­u­fac­tur­ers are going to start dig­ging into their pock­ets and shelling out funds for advertisements.

That’s right tech fans, it’s hol­i­day shop­ping season.

So to help pre­pare you for the stores and e-tailers, I’ve com­piled a list of terms you might want to have handy when shop­ping. Proces­sor — this is the brain of every com­puter; it’s often­times called a CPU, or cen­tral pro­cess­ing unit. The basic mea­sure­ment of speed is in mega­hertz, which is abbre­vi­ated MHz. Recently, CPUs have become so fast that their speed is mea­sured in giga­hertz, GHz. Essen­tially, the more mega­hertz, the faster the proces­sor. Be savvy, though. Why buy a 1.5 GHz proces­sor for a lot more than a 1 GHz? You won’t notice the dif­fer­ence in speed. The latest proces­sor for PCs is the Pen­tium 4, often abbre­vi­ated as P4; the latest for the Mac­in­tosh is a G4.

RAM — After the proces­sor, the amount of Random Access Memory you have deter­mines the speed of your machine. RAM is where a com­puter loads the oper­at­ing system and the pro­grams you’re run­ning. The more RAM, the faster your system will be when run­ning sev­eral pro­grams, or doing some­thing memory inten­sive, like work­ing in Pho­to­shop. RAM is mea­sured in megabytes; in gen­eral, don’t settle for any­thing less than 128 MB. Even if you’re only going to run a few appli­ca­tions at first, 128 MB will give you room to expand if want to do more.

Hard drive — If RAM is your office desk that gets wiped clean when you shut down your com­puter, the hard drive is the filing cab­i­net you put every­thing into. It’s the place where all your files, from MP3s to e-mails, get stored. You want as much space as you can afford, I think. Almost every hard drive these days can hold at least 1 giga­byte. The com­puter I bought four and a half years ago had a 9 GB drive, and I need more room.

CD burn­ers — Where do you put data when you don’t have room on your hard drive, or just want to share it with a friend? That’s where exter­nal stor­age comes into play. CD-​RW drives allow you to burn data to a CD-R disc per­ma­nently or to a CD-​RW disc over and over again. The max stor­age on these is about 750 MB, and you can use them to burn audio CDs of MP3s for you car or work stereo. Their speed is listed like this: write speed x re-​write speed x read speed. For instance, my very old burner is a 2×2x4. The higher the number, the faster it is.

Zip drives — If you’ve got a 25 MB file that’s too big for a floppy disk but a waste of CD, you’ll want a Zip drive, or some other type of remov­able stor­age. Zip has pretty much become the stan­dard, and the newest model reads disks that hold 250 MB or 100 MB. Superdisk drives read stan­dard flop­pies and 120 MB spe­cial disks, but aren’t as widely found as Zip drives.

Well, I’m just about out of room, but keep your browsers pointed to www.​heisel.​org/​y​o​u​r​d​i​g​i​world and look out for a grow­ing Tech Term dic­tio­nary. Also e-mail me at yourdigiworld@yahoo.com if you want more infor­ma­tion before you start research­ing a com­puter pur­chase, or with any of your dig­i­tal questions.

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