New chip companies enter the fray. Processor performance shoots up. Buyers get more computer for less money. But competition can also be confusing. What's more, the CPU wars are only the beginning.
Chip sets galore.
Just four years ago, Intel's Pentiums first iinched past the 200-MHz mark. But the days when megahertz was all that mattered are long gone. Components such as memory, hard drives, and graphics cards can make a huge difference in system performance. You need to make sense of it all, and that's not always easy to do. Too often the technical arcana posing as intelligence are about as understandable as the nutritional information on a box of Froot Loops.