The Most Important Factors When Buying a New Windows PC

Wow, that's quite a question! Let's start with the most obvious problem with Windows computers: the longer you use them, the more luggage you have to drag around when you boot, start up programs, and shut down. This can take the form of legitimate utilities (you know, the tiny little icons that show up on your task bar and give you convenient access to AOL, your screen parameters, Google search, and on and on and on) and it can also more nefariously take the form of spyware, malware and other nasties that are busy watching your activity and stealing computer cycles.

As a result, the most important software you can run on your Windows machine is a really good, robust anti-spyware application. More than that, however, you also need something that helps you wrest control of your automatically launched utilities and applications too (the inability to manage this is easily one of the greatest design flaws in Windows). For the former, I recommend Colorado-grown Webroot.com's Spy Sweeper, and for the latter I have to say that I haven't seen anything that makes it clear and simple. There are utilities like Error Nuker, but you have to be pretty savvy to figure out how to use them, unfortunately.

That's why I'm going to make what will seem like a weird recommendation, but it's one I hear again and again from Windows gurus: make a reliable backup of all your data then reformat your disk and reinstall Windows from scratch.

Yes, I just said that you should reformat your drive to see if you can improve the performance of your Windows system.

This would be the project of an afternoon, most likely, and most of that time will be spent watching files copy and transfer, rather than actually doing anything actively. Seems crazy, but it's really the best way to ensure that you get rid of all the little bits of junk that are dragging your system down.

If you do this, make sure that you do a clean "reformat the disk drive" install, otherwise you'll find much of the stuff you don't want is still present. When you do reinstall Windows on your system, make sure that the first thing you do is to run "Windows Update". And for good luck, I run it a couple of times, until it reports that there are no updates to apply.

Now you can reinstall your core applications and find that it's clean and I'll bet quite a bit faster. Mostly what I hear from people that go through this process is "it's like a brand new computer. Wow!"

But perhaps you just came into a small inheritance or won the Lottery and would rather just buy a new computer and put all your "copy data" and "install applications" effort onto the new one, not your scrubbed old computer. Okay, we all thank you for keeping our economy moving, make sure that you donate the old computer to a good charity or local non-profit please.

What to buy, though? Rather amazingly as computing power has increased each year, the answer has not become any easier. There are different processor chips, different internal card technologies, different memory configurations and oh, so many other variations, and that's without even considering a laptop!

Nonetheless, I suggest that there are a couple of factors to consider that are tantamount to you being a happy computer user. The first is memory. You can't get too much memory, but having too little memory (memory = RAM, not disk space) will definitely slow you down. 1GB of RAM is a bare minimum, and I really suggest that 2GB will be a smart investment of an extra $30-$40 or so (memory's cheap).

There are more factors, but let's hold off on that until tomorrow's blog entry, which I'll link to once it's up and live. Stay tuned for that!