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A friend recently asked me how much it would cost to build them a new machine. To me, that’s the wrong question to ask – or at the very least, its an insufficient question. Whether you are building or buying, I think you need to do a little more digging in order to get the right machine at the right price.

Every machine is a balance of compromises, so it comes down to the answers to the following:

• What is your budget?
• Desktop [ ] or Laptop [ ]?
• Screen Size?
  • None [ ]
  • < 13″ (i.e. Netbook) [ ]
  • 13″ (i.e. UltraPortable) [ ]
  • 14″ [ ]
  • 15-16″ [ ]
  • 17″ [ ]
  • 20″ [ ]
  • 24″ [ ]
  • 27″ [ ]
  • > 27″ [ ]
• What are the primary applications the machine would run?
  • Office:
    • Light (occasional word processing) [ ],
    • Medium (Docs, Spreadsheets often) [ ],
    • Heavy (you live in MS Office, Outlook) [ ]
  • Media usage?
    • Light (youTube, facebook) [ ],
    • Medium (occasional Hulu, [ ],
    • Heavy (main device for movies, TV) [ ]
  • Gaming?
    • Light (i.e. Mine Sweeper, Solitaire, Casino games) [ ],
    • Medium (older installed games) [ ],
    • Heavy (i.e. modern installed games) [ ]
  • Business/Home Management (i.e. YNAB, MS Money, etc.) [ ]
• How much space do you need for storage?
  • < 250GB (small music and photo collection, apps) [ ]
  • 250GB – 500GB (Many apps, large data sets, full iPod) [ ]
  • 500GB+ (Large music, movie or photo collection, many apps, modern games) [ ]
• How much use will the machine get? (low: > 2hr/day, office: 8hr/day, heavy: 8+ hours/day)
• How much of an impact to your day if it doesn’t work: 0-10 where 0 = no impact and 10 is your day halts
• Any special considerations (i.e. hearing, visually impaired user, etc.)

Is this overkill? Maybe. But chances are you have been burned in the past with a cheap machine, or over-spent on a powerhouse only to realize later that it didn’t meet one of your key needs.

Those Office programs may not seem like much, but when you have a couple open at the same time, you quickly chew up RAM. Switching quickly between applications can be as hard on your machine as some games, so adequate video horsepower is a must. A decent sized photo collection can fit on smaller hard drives without a hitch, unless you shoot in very high quality or RAW (like the pros). Storage for games. music and movies is also quality dependent. The higher the quality, the more storage is required. For many systems, this is an easy upgrade down the road, but if you can only have a single drive at a time (like in some laptops) then you will have to re-install your operating system which is a hassle. Home management apps usually store data in flat files or databases – having a faster hard drive can mean the difference between getting things done and waiting for the hour-glass to go away. Sometimes, horsepower comes at the expense of reliability, like with RAID drive arrays. You get a lot of speed, but increase your risk for a drive failure. Faster processors generate more heat and use more electricity which shortens battery life (on a laptop) and increases the noise a machine makes to keep itself cool. That makes the speediest processors a bad fit for a media machine where the fan noise can ruin the viewing experience.

All of these decisions have an impact on budget and brand choice, so know what you will use it for before diving in.