• You need a friend. Or, anyway, someone to talk to. I am prepared to help beginners provided I can cope with the deluge of mail, phone calls, etc. But there is a problem! The people you talk to will most likely not be expert in your particular program. Look for help from our Dial-Help pages.
• Choose your shop carefully. You want it close to your computer. You are bound to have questions, especially at first, and you don't have time or money to travel 15 km every time. Avoid telling them you are a complete beginner. Many of the sales people you encounter know less than you. Try them out, ask questions (doesn't matter if they're silly). Evaluate the answers. Were they given freely or did you feel you were being a nuisance? Don't buy anything now, go home and think it over. Try (this is hard) to buy from a shop which has been in that location for some reasonable time (years).
• Look for a shop that has some service facilities. Walk in and say you have a problem with your machine, do they do service work? Stick your nose in their workshop if you can (if they have one).
• If you buy a system, insist that it be set up and tested in your home. This is part of the deal and should be included in the price. If they wont do it, go somewhere else. There are plenty of shops.
• Be clear about what you are going to buy. There are a lot of decisions to be made here. I'll try to help with these in this and future columns. Don't spend your last dollar on a super fast computer and have no money left for a printer, software, and any other needs. Be sure that you have an operating system included in the price, DOS version 5 would be my suggestion. And be sure you get DOS manuals with your system If you don't, it's very likely you have an illegal copy of DOS. Be aware that software may cost you more than the system hardware, and fines for illegal copies will cost you even more.

The 386 and 486 processors can manage memory. The 8088 and 286 cannot. With memory managers you can have enormous memories of up to 16 MB and the processor will look after what goes where and you will never see that message, "not enough memory ... ". They can also maximise the amount of 'conventional' memory available to run those programs that can use only conventional memory. Also, the 386 and 486 can run any software now available or likely to be available in the near future.

My advice is, start from the top. Buy a 486DX if you can possibly manage it, but leave yourself some money for other things. The very lowest-level processor you should buy is a 386, and get the DX version if the bank manager permits.

The monitor

The first decision is monochrome (single colour, may be green, amber, or white) or full colour. Mono is OK if you are using only text, and will save you quite a few dollars. Colour has big advantages in making your programs easier to use, because usually you can choose the on-screen colours to suit your eye; different parts of the screen will stand out because of contrasting colours. Buy the very best monitor you can afford, you are going to spend a lot of time looking at it. Looking at a second-rate monitor will drive you mad after a while and you will go out to spend money on a better one. I have a top brand VGA monitor that is now nearing three years old and it is still a delight to use.

The VGA refers to the type of monitor. There are three levels of colour monitor you may be offered, CGA (ugh), EGA (obsolescent), and VGA. So-called Super VGA is worth considering, let your eyes be the judge.

Printer

No need to get fancy here unless you need high-class printing for some reason. I have a rather plain 9-pin dot matrix printer that is five years old and does nearly everything I want. A 24-pin printer would be nice, though. If I need anything special I take a floppy disk to the local Home Secretaries Network lady who has a laser that prints superb quality, but of course that printer cost her thousands. 

Keyboard 

There are some lousy keyboards around, so try before you buy, you will easily pick the good from the bad.

Mouse

Keyboard control is much faster, although it may require more learning time. Be aware that graphical interface programs require lots of memory and a really fast processor to run successfully. I have never bought a mouse but accept that one day I probably must.

Floppy Disk Drives

For all the apparent advantages of the 3.5 inch floppy, they never seem to have really taken off. Your first drive should be a 5.25 inch 1.2 MB drive. If you can afford more than one, the second drive could be a 3.5 inch. I personally prefer to have two 5.25 inch drives, it is a much faster system for making copies, making backups, etc.

Hard Disk Drive

Buy the biggest you can afford, up to about 1001B. You will use all that space eventually! 1 MB = 1 million bytes. A byte is a measure of the amount of information.

And Now Back to Ron's Tale of Woe

Having said my little piece about purchasing, which I hope some of you will have found helpful, its time to return to A Beginner's Tale. As you may remember, I had at last got a working computer but couldn't do anything with it due to total lack of software.

Back to my pre-retirement colleagues. They looked harassed and said. "You need DOS, that's the operating system everybody uses. There's probably an old version around somewhere you can have". A battered-looking floppy disk duly appeared. "It boots", they said, just stick it into your A drive (the top one) before you switch on".

Following their instructions resulted in some beeping and grinding, and on the screen was, A:\

At this point it dawned on me that I'd better learn something about this operating system called DOS, like what is it, and what does it do? How can I use it? Of course I had no manuals, though with early Doss versions it's doubtful if they would have been much help. Into the city to the Swanston Street bookshops and discovered a Self-Teaching Guide called PCDOS.  I eagerly devoured this book, and it taught me many things, elementary but essential. Let me tell you about some of those things in the next episode of A Beginner's Tale next month.

Reprinted from the December 1992 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia