Mme Recluse is considering buying a new computer, in time for the new operating system Microsoft is now coming out with, (She currently has Windows XP Pro)and neither of us is knowledgeable enough to spec out what she needs. She is interested in doing a lot of Photoshop stuff, interactive graphics, gaming, animations and so on, and she is active on the Pottermore website. Her last machine (purchased about 2003) cost $2700. We hope to spend not much more than the same now. I was led to understand that at the time it was a pretty capable machine for graphics. Today, it seems somewhat underpowered for what she wants to do.

Here are what I believe were the relevant specs for her existing machine. Given advances in the state of the art, we should be able to get much better performance for the same price today.

Pentium (R4 cpu 2.53GHz) 1.5 Gbytes RAM, 111GBytes disk memory).

Can some of you give me some idea of what specs to shop for (numbers please). I’m afraid we don’t even know what questions to ask, or where to go look them up. Please feel free to ask clarifying questions.

I guess what we are looking for is a page full of numbers indicating speed, memory, capacity etc so we can order something appropriate to her needs.

Thanks.