BRAAIIINNSSSS!

You've made the decision - it's time for a new computer.  Off you toddle to PC World, with your hard earned readies in your sweaty little mitts.  You walk in the door, walk straight over to the computers... 
...
...
"MY GOD - I DON'T UNDERSTAND ANY OF THIS GARBAGE!  DAMN YOU!  DAMN YOU ALL TO HELLLLLL!"
... and sink slowly to your knees, weeping for your lost innocence....


Have no fear!  It's honestly not all that bad, and I'm here to help you.  When buying a computer, the three most important things are processor, memory and disk space.  As I've dealt with the last two subjects before, I think it's time we looked at the biggy - Central Processor Units (CPU's, or processors) - the brain of the computer.  So, without further ado, here we go...

Intel & AMD are the main manufacturers of computer processors (known as CPU's) used in home/business computers (note: for the sake of this thread, I'm ignoring Apple - no offence iFans...)

Intel produces several ranges of CPU - in descending order of computing power (and age) we have...

i7 - most powerful and newest (up to 6 cores)
i5 (up to 4 cores)
i3 (2 cores)
Pentium (1-2 cores)
Celeron - least powerful and oldest. (1 core)

AMD have their own chip range....

FX - most powerful and newest
A-series
Phenom II
Athlon II
Sempron II - least powerful and oldest.

Cores: In computing terms, a "core" is one logical processor. Years ago (back in the 90's) all CPU's had one single core. As technology has progressed, the CPU designs have evolved and many now contain more than one logical processor in their physical CPU chip (For example, i7 CPU's can have 4 logical processors) - the advantage of this is "hyper threading" - that is, having the computer run more than one task simultaneously, with no performance hit (older CPU's can't do this).

Quad Core: A CPU with 4 logical processors
Dual Core: A CPU with 2 logical processors

The more logical processors, the better your computer can "potentially" multitask - this depends ENTIRELY on the operating system installed (Windows 7 for example)...

This, combined with the move to 64bit processing, means that computers these days are incredibly powerful beasts compared to 10 years ago...

For buyers, here are the following recommendations....

1. Buy an Intel based chip. There's nothing wrong with AMD chips (I've used lots of them in the past, and they're great), but Microsoft work hand-in-glove with Intel, which means that Windows will not only be better supported, but will run better too..

2. Buy the best processor you can afford - i.e If you have the choice between I3 and I5, choose I5 - you can always upgrade memory / disk space later...