1. At least 2 GB of RAM if you are getting Vistas’ Premium, Business, or Ultimate, and Mac OS X Leopard. If you are getting Vista Basic 2 GB will not hurt especially if you want to upgrade later to a higher version of Vista. The more RAM you have the smoother your computer will run in terms of both speed and overall ease of use.

2. Hard Drive of at least 80- 160 GB. A standard for today is 160 GB and you can even find computers on sale in stores with more space. Just a note: If you plan on using your computer for a lot of music, videos or pictures, the more space you have will be better. A space of 160- 320 GB or more would be good.

3. Processor of at least dual core. Both major chip-makers AMD and Intel currently sell Dual Core chips mainly under the names Intel Core 2 Duo for Intel, and AMD Athlon 64×2 for AMD. A couple words of note on picking a processor for your computer: 1.  2 cores are very common right now among both desktop and laptops, and do produce nice performance, 4 core chips though are starting to become more mainstream (especially for desktops) and will make your computer work a lot better and faster, so it is worth the wait for them to come. The wait for them as it is will not be longer than a couple months for them to start more commonly appearing. 2. When buying an average  laptop (14-17 inch screen, not Tablet PC),  make sure to get a Daul Core processor that is at least 1.8 to 2.0 GHZ, the amount of GHZ per core helps with the overall speed of your computer.

General Advice: If you are buying a computer from a store and not customizing it online, try to use it in the store and see how quickly it opens up programs, goes onto the  Internet, views photos, plays music and videos etc., this is important because that computer will be set to a similar specification that you will get from that store and can help you decide if that computer works to your liking. Don’t understand some of the terms mentioned here like processor, RAM etc., see our Basic Computer Terms guide http://tech4teens.wordpress.com/2007/12/19/basic-computer-terms/ for more information.  Any comments, feel free to add them by clicking on Add Comment link above.