So, you might want...

OS: Windows 7 would be my personal choice. Windows 8 is horrible and 10 is very very new

Processor: for Office and browsing even an i3 is good enough, clock speed anything over 2GHz should see you right. "Par" would be something like an i5 running at 2.5GHz.

Memory: the more the better - this will impact performance more than the processor. You can get away with 4GB, I personally wouldn't go below 8Gb but that's just me

Hard drive: choice between SATA/oldskool and SSD. SSD (solid state disk) is much faster - your machine will start up and run much quicker - but tend to be smaller. My main box has a hybrid: 1Tb SATA (=slow, large storage) and 128Gb SSD (=fast, small storage - has the operating system and stuff it makes a difference to have on fast storage on, everything else like Program Files and iTunes and media etc all go on the slower disk since it's still quite fast enough for all that).

WiFi: you want at least 802.11n and ideally 802.11ac - don't get something that's only 802.11b and 802.11g is quite slow these days as well. Don't worry if you don't know what that means, just look for "n" or "ac" at the end :-)

USB: ideally USB3.0 ports but honestly USB2.0 is plenty good enough for most people unless you're running high throughput peripherals/constantly transferring a lot of data to external drives

So for me a "par" spec might be something like:

- Processor: i5 @2.5GHz
- RAM: 8GB
- Disk: 512Gb SSD or SSD/SATA hybrid
- Wifi: 802.11n (ideally 802.11ac)
- at least two USB ports and ideally four
- any box with the above will have decent enough graphics unless you're a hardcore gamer or 3D designer which I'm not sure you are - so don't worry about the graphics card or audio card, whatever you get will do

Posted By: Old Man, Aug 10, 19:57:00