H Caroline,

Will it just be mainly used for surfing?

Do you have gamers in your household? Members who are into music who might want huge music files?

How would it be used?

Sue

I have a 5 year old Dell, and have been very pleased with it. I carried the extended warranty for 5 years, and it is no longer available, but I will continue to get free out of warranty tech support for the life of this computer.

A Dell technician came out and installed a new motherboard about a year ago.

Cost of repairs in 5 years- $0....zilch.

No music,(or very little),I do play Pogo games occassionally. Mostly save pictures and surf.Only other files I save are patterns from my quilting hobby. Thanks for your help,I have no clue about"requirements"

I am assuming you are talking about a desktop not a laptop?

Ram is the memory the pc has and GB's relate to the size of the hard drive or how much space you have that you can store stuff on the drive.

What type of use are you wanting it for you say home use but to different people that means different things, gives us an idea, do you use photo programs a lot, editing, business applications, office suites, gaming, or do you only do email and surfing the web.

Acer is a good brand yes, I like HP I have several HP computers that have served me well.
How much are you wanting to spend and do you want it to have a new flat panel monitor and keyboard, mouse included in the package or do you just need the computer tower?

Are you wanting to stay with XP or do you want to go to a Vista operating system?
Do you want to buy at a local store or will you consider online purchase?

About PC Memory

here are some models to give you some guidance, read the specs on these to get some ideas for a good general use pc.

This one would be a good lower end general use pc, not a huge hard drive but good for basic use and it comes with a very nice 19" lcd monitor.
HP Pavilion a6683w-b Desktop PC w/ AMD Sempron X2 2200 Dual-Core Processor (with 19" Wide LCD Monitor

(these are examples of the actual units not necessarily saying to buy them at these locations, get the info on the specs and the model numbers)

this one would be the step up and a much better choice in that it has more memory a much larger hard drive and a larger monitor, this one would handle pretty much anything.
HP Pavilion a6603w-b Desktop PC w/ Intel Pentium Dual-Core Processor E2220 with 20" Wide LCD Monitor

so give those a look and read the specs on them and that will give some guidance.

you may run into some that have AMD processors instead of Intel, I personally prefer AMD processors and that is what I buy, they are sometimes a little cheaper, but either would be ok for what you want.

HP/Compaq (same mfg.) you will always have FREE tech support 24/7 and the online/chat help is great have used it a few times, when I got my Pc a driver was missing, he sent me the link in e-mail so I could download it.. our laptop is an Acer and works great, but if we ever get a new PC it will be HP for sure, also we have XP but after doing research on Vista, found out it is huge, and therefore has duel core, and should be at least 2GB RAM to move it's big butt...LOL harddrive is up to you but most now are 200+

I have no clue what a dual core is...and do yopu mean hard to move as in a heavy component????

if you mean hard to move as in reference to Vista no it means that Vista is a large program and needs lots of resources to run it, lots of Ram for example, nothing to do with weight.

Dual core is the processor most you will find now will be dual core rather than single core. Will be either an Intel or an AMD. This is a quote from Chris Prillo
"Dual core refers to the number of processing cores in the processor package. So, in essence, with a dual core processor you actually have two processors. The advantage is that you can get up to twice the processing power. If you do a lot of video editing, photo editing, or run many programs at one time youÂll notice a significant increase in the responsiveness of your system."

I would not get less than 2Gig of Ram, and for hard drive I would go for 200GB or larger, the largest you can afford, if you are going with a Vista system go for more Ram 3Gig would be better than 2Gig. If you go with Vista get at least Vista home premium not Basic.

If you look at the ones I listed for you above you can get an idea of what to look for by looking at the list of specs for those units.

to get an idea of RAM this explains it pretty well it is an older article however.
What is RAM?

Just to further confuse you, with the Intel processors, Core2duo, are better than the dual core, then even better yet, are the Core 2 Quad and the Quad Core Xeon which is the top of the top.....lol