Be certain to get a camera with an optical view finder. It's cool to compose your shots on the LCD display, but it eats batteries very fast. As far as downloading to your computer, keep the future in mind. There are adapters available to convert any connection to any other connection, but from my experience transferring a bunch of photos from camera to computer via serial port is agonizingly slow, and an adapter won't help. If the camera you're considering doesn't have at least USB, pass it up.
Optical zoom is the only kind that really means anything.
Thus, you end up with a low resolution image. Optical zoom uses lenses to magnify the image that hits the CCD producing a full resolution close up. I plan on buying something that may be useful into the future in a similar way now. I bought an Olympus XA around 1980 myself, and still use it. It's great to get a camera that doesn't become obsolete quickly.