by Shaz Slaughter

Created on: January 03, 2009

Computers come in three basic varieties. You have towers, mini towers and laptops.

The tower is one of the more common types of computer and is the largest of the three. With a tower you have the freedom to add lots of hardware such as multiple hard drives and CD ROM or DVD ROM drives. The reason why is because towers have more space reserved for your drives or bays as they are called. With more space in general towers also allow the use of bigger mother boards.

The advantage of having a bigger mother board usually means you can support or add more upgrades at once such as video cards, internal modems and LAN cards. Although many mother boards will have these features built-in to the board they can not be upgraded or removed from the board if you wish to change them. The biggest disadvantage with a tower is they tend to take up quite a bit of space.

A mini tower is exactly what it sounds like, a smaller tower. The advantages of a mini tower are very obvious in the fact that they take up less space. Many people place mini towers on their desk next to their monitor rather than on the floor like many people do with towers.

The smaller mini towers can only accommodate smaller mother boards and you do not have as many bays which means you will not have as many slots to add video cards or any other upgrades like adding another CD ROM drive. However tower mother boards and mini tower mother boards have the same processor speed and memory capacity available so you do not have to compromise performance or speed by choosing either.

As small as a mini tower is it still lacks the all-on-one efficiency to be considered truly portable. That is where the laptop comes into play. The laptop is the most portable of the three. It can be taken just about anywhere and everywhere and people usually do. One of the downsides to the laptop's portability is the fact that the battery only lasts about 2 hours, which means you will probably be looking for a power outlet if you plan on using a laptop for more than a few hours at a time.

Another issue is the cost. While a tower and mini tower costs are not that drastically different, laptops cost much more than either. Yet another down side to the laptop is performance. Laptops are designed mainly with portability in mind, which usually means a sacrifice in performance, unless you are willing to pay more money.

The laptop is also not as easy to upgrade as its tower and mini tower counterparts. You can usually add memory and a PC card, which can act as a wireless or Bluetooth connection if one is not available with the laptop, but that is about it. So whatever the laptop comes with that is basically all you get.

Learn more about this author, Shaz Slaughter.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.