There’s no question that personal computers were built with baseline functionality- all of them can process documents, and to a certain extent, play multimedia and display the same. However, there are significant difference when we think of specific needs of users of personal computers.

Here is an easy to understand scenario: compare a student and a professional PC gamer. If you are thinking about which types of PC fits which, then you can expect significant differences between the two.

What does a student need a computer for in the first place? Let us try to discuss what kinds of activities that a university student would engage in, so that we can tie that up with the kinds of functionality later. A student would be doing a lot of typing- this is a given. Depending on what he or she is taking up in the university, more or less the computer would be used often as a typewriter, and of course, for printing.

If the course of the student is in the range of engineering or architecture, the computing power of the PC can be the same, but there are some specific changes. For example, he or she is likely to have hundreds to thousands of files to save, so a huge hard disk space is needed.

With regards to the size of the hard drive, at the very least an 80 GB drive would do for the college student, while some may need space as large as 300 GB. After considering the memory of the PC, then you should now think about the computing power, and that depends on the type of processor you get. A processor with speeds like 1.5 GHz and a 512 MB video card would suffice for the student. If you are thinking about these specs for a gamer, however, then there are some changes.

A gamer is most likely to have a PC for two main reasons: for working and for playing. You can tell that the play aspect will be the one that expects a lot of effort on the part of the PC. Think about it: the PC must process algorithms repeatedly during game time, play sounds and videos, and receive non-stop input from the user.

Speaking of hard disk space, a gamer would need more space that a mere 300 GB, simply because of the software and files that need to be saved. In actuality, hard drives with large disk space can be very expensive, which is why some gamers install more than one hard disk on their PC. There are some games that can consume 5 GB of space or more, jus to have them installed, and when the game is being played, more memory will be needed as well.

In terms of the processor, it is a given that a gamer needs one that has a high computing power, such as Intel Skulltrail for instance. If the processor cannot accommodate the demands for the gamer, then the playing experience will not be satisfactory at all.