3 Steps to Buying the Right Computer for You

This computer buying guide will give you the timeless principles you will need to purchase the right computer for you, be it your first, second or twenty-second. After 12 years of selling computers, I've managed to distill the computer buying process to just three questions. These three simple questions, along with some thought, will be all you need to buy the right computer for you.

Take a minute and write down the answer to this question:

1) I want to have a computer so that I can __________

This one is the hardest to answer honestly, because you will either overestimate what you need to do by thinking of all the things you've ever heard can be done on a computer or underestimate what you need to do by thinking you "should only be doing" certain things and "shouldn't be doing" things that you'll end up doing anyway. Take a deep breath and remember what first led you to consider buying a computer.
Did you want to start a business or did you just want to get onto the Internet and read your email?

Be brutally honest with yourself answering this next question:

Did you want to be able to play computer games?

More people trip themselves up on this one question than any other question. Denying that you want to play games leads to more people being dissatisfied with the computer they wind up buying, as that leads them to not purchase the software or hardware necessary for gaming.

Now that you have a list of things you want to do with your computer, the next question is...

2) What applications do you need to allow you do the things you want?

We'll now move our focus towards finding the software you'll need to get the things done. Some of the things, like surfing the web and sending email, are easily done by applications which are included in the computer's operating system. Other things, like small business bookkeeping, photo editing, and desktop publishing, are best done with software like QuickBooks (for small business), Adobe Photoshop (for photo editing), and Quark Xpress (for magazine/newsletter publishing).