Quality, Performance, & Support

Quality: unfortunately in computers it has become a ever growing market of how can I cheat you. So quality has become someone who doesn't cheat you on the numbers you don't know to look for, as well as that someone who has the product that they are proud of and you can see why there proud of it.

Performance: what else needs to be said? We want speed, we want power, and we want stability.

Support: does the company  support there product, or worse do they try to hide who they even are, without support, what good are they?

 
 

Motherboard	Your Mother Board is the main structure of your computer. It is what lets everything get where it needs to go. Think of it as the infrastructure of a city (streets, traffic lights, etc.).  Small streets or not enough of them can slow traffic to a crawl, less managed streets become traffic jams. We all want the most open street, with the highest speed limit, and the most direct route. Those same rules can be applied to a mother board.
CPU	The brain of your computer, the part that crunches all of the numbers that makes your computer do whatever it is that you want it to do. The faster the CPU, the faster everything gets done.
Memory	For the most part this is just temporary storage, sorta like a guest closet in the front of the house. And, when your having a party, it's never big enough.
Cooling	Probably the most overlooked, yet a very important part of the computer. You don't perform well when your hot and neither dose your computer.
Video	As the most important part of the computer is you, the video card has to be important as it is how the computer gets the information to you. The fastest computer in the world is useless if everything is just standing in line waiting on the video, waiting to get to you.
Sound	Simply the part of your computer that makes noise. Like your stereo the quality of the sound depends on the quality of the component. But in a computer you also have a compatibility issue. That is will your programs be able to communicate with it?
Controller	This is how your computer communicates with your Drive(s). Today we basically have IDE, SCSI, and Fiber Channel. IDE is by far the most common, and the slowest. SCSI is a little faster, used mostly in servers, graphic and sound editors, and high end gaming machines. Fiber Channel is the fastest, but something most of us can only dream about.
Communication	How your computer communicates with other computers. Most commonly this is done through modems, or network cards. the faster your card, the faster you can get the information you are looking for. Here too fiber is finding a new home, and hence more speed.
Hard Drive	This is where everything is stored. Everything from your programs, to the data you create, is stored here. And just as in everything else, you never have enough space. But here too speed is important, as when you want whatever it is that you want, you don't want to have to wait for it.
Floppy Drive	An outdated medium for saving and retrieving data, but unfortunately a medium computers are still dependent on.
Optical Drive	Most commonly known as CD-Roms, simply a way to input programs and other data into your computer. DVD is simply a newer, larger form of Optical Drive. And of course recorders are available in both mediums to allow you to save your own data to these larger mediums.
Bernelly Drive	Another outdated medium for saving data. Probably the most well known is the Zip drive.
Case	Another on of those often overlooked parts of the computer. Choose a case with forethought, it must do more than just look good, it must be upgradable, that is it should not only be compatible with all the variants on the market today, it should leave room for future changes, and the Case should be designed so that those upgrades can be made easily.
Power Supply	This is usually included with the case. It's importance is as it's name suggests, to be able to supply power to your computer. So the more power your Power Supply supplies, the more toys you can add to your computer. But that isn't all there is to a Power Supply, it must also clean the power so that it is a constant that the various parts of a computer can depend on it. Power Supplies of today are very inadequate at this, and one of the reasons a good Surge Protector is necessary.
Monitor
Mouse
Keyboard