It is an absolutely dumb machine which can do wonders if used by an intelligent human. It is made of several parts, each as important as the other. Lets try to put together a computer with the best possible parts in the minimum cost.

Chip: There are various chips available in the market viz. Intel, AMD, Cyrix, Texas Instruments etc. The safest bet is to go for an Intel chip, not because the others are not good, because it is the most widely available and popular chip manufacturer. There are various options available in the Intel range. The minimum one can start with is a Pentium . The Pentium family consists of the following- Pentium, Pentium MMX [Multi-media Xtension - essentially a Pentium with 256 KB cache on board the chip],Pentium Pro [essentially a Pentium with 512 KB cache on board the chip], Pentium II [Pentium MMX + Pentium Pro]. Depending on one’s requirement and of course the budget one can decide which chip to go for. If you are looking at using the machine purely for business use i.e. correspondence and accounting purposes, a Pentium 166 Mhz. would be a good buy. If you want the machine for graphics, then entry level would be the Pentium 166 MMX. For users who are going to use it for programming, a Pentium 200 Mhz or if in the budget, a Pentium Pro would be good buy. And if you really have a great budget then go for the Pentium II 233 Mhz. chip. Its amazingly fast!

Mother board: Make sure that you get an original Intel mother board. It should be up-gradable to a faster chip if and when you decide to upgrade your machine. There are some boards available in the market which claim to have the original Intel chip set. Avoid them. A bad mother board will affect the performance of your machine. Some of them also don’t have cache on board. They have what is known as DUMMY CACHE. Here the BIOS is conned into thinking that there is on board cache when there is none. Also the price difference between an Intel board and any other make is not much, so spending a bit more now will be beneficial in the long run.

Cache: A very important part of the machine. Make sure you have at least 256 KB cache on board. This has a lot to say in the speed of your machine. Nowadays, all the Intel boards come with L2 Pipeline Burst Cache. This is very fast and does make a difference in the speed of your machine. Basically whatever command you give to the machine goes to the cache first, hence bigger the cache faster the processing.

RAM: You should start with at least 16MB. There are different kinds available in the market. They are EDO, EDO ECC [EDO RAM with error correction], DRAM [Dynamic RAM], SDRAM [Synchronous Dynamic RAM]. EDO is the cheapest as compared to the others. If you plan to use W95 and other W95 packages, then you will need atleast 16MB for some decent speed. My advice would be to go for 32MB because, nowadays even softwares like Office’97 have a lot of graphics involved. In fact nowadays many graphic intensive games and also Coreldraw, Pagemaker etc. run much better with 32 MB. If you plan to invest in a TV Tuner card or MPEG II card, 32 MB would be ideal to give you good picture quality.

Hard Disk Drive: This will probably be your main storage device. Go for SEAGATE, QUANTUM or SAMSUNG. All of these have a good market reputation and are very reliable. Entry-level HDD capacity now is 1.2GB to 2.1GB. Make sure you are getting an EIDE drive and that it is an original piece as there are a lot of duplicate or defective pieces floating around.

Floppy Disk Drive: Nothing much to say here except go for a TDK or SONY 1.44Mb 3.5" drive as they are the most popular and reliable makes available.

CD-ROM: Entry - level now is the 16X drive. 24X is also available for around Rs.600/- more. Reliable makes are again Sony, Creative, Acer, TDK, etc.

Keyboard: There are two types available viz. Mechanical and Membrane. Mechanical keyboards cost more, but are more durable. Membrane keyboards are also good, but the only disadvantage as such is that you have to replace the whole membrane underneath the keys even if one key is not working. I would only suggest that if there going to be more than one users for your machine, go for a mechanical keyboard (it can withstand more abuse) or else for a single user machine a Membrane keyboard is fine. TVSE mechanical keyboards are the best available in the market. For membrane keyboards check out Mitsumi or Chicony.

Mouse: If you plan to work on Autocad, go for a 3-button mouse. Go for either Microsoft, Logitech or Genius.

VGA Card: It depends on what you intend to use the machine for. For normal correspondence or business use a 32 bit card with 1MB VRAM is fine. If you intend to use it for graphics, choose a good VGA card. It will make a hell of a lot of difference in graphics on screen. Good ones are S3 TRIO S4 V+ with 2MB VRAM, Cirrus Logic or if you really don’t mind the cost go for the Matrox Millenium with 4Mb VRAM. This card is great for graphics.

Monitor: COLOUR only. Mono monitors are out except for servers wherein you are not going to see any graphics. Should be non-interlaced with a 1024 x 768 resolution. Best buys are Samtron, Viewsonic or Goldstar. Also they should be flicker free and "Green" monitors. Do not go in for cheap buys. A classic case is of TVM, cheap monitor, sold a lot, and then it disappeared from the market. Then came WIN95, where do you get the TVM OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) drivers from? Make a nice budget and don’t cut corners on it.

Multi-Media Kit: This is purely optional. But preferably go for it. You can use for a lot more things other than listening to music. Make sure you go for a FULL DUPLEX sound card if you plan to use Internet Telephone. Best buy is the Creative AWE 64 Kit. Slightly expensive, but fantastic performance. Also go for a Creative kit as it is the most popular and reliable make available. Preferably buy a full Creative Kit and not the OEM ones in which only the sound card is probably Creative and the rest of the components are form different companies.

Modem: Nothing less than 33.6 KBPS. Best buys are Hayes, Motorola, US Robotics and Boca. If your budget is already over-priced then go for a GVC.