by Adewale Atewogbade

Created on: February 19, 2010

If you are in the market for a computer, you must try not to limit your preferences to what is inside the black box.  Sure it is okay to have several gigabytes of internal hard drive space and tons of ram with gigahertz of CPU speed.  This will definitely give you a powerful system when properly configured.  Having taken those into consideration you should also consider the external components- aka thew peripherals that are going to help unleash the multimedia experience your brand new gizmo is capable of dishing out.

The most important external computer peripherals include but are not limited to printers, web cameras, keyboard/mouse combination, speakers, backup drives networking devices and of course the ubiquitous monitors.  Without these components, your powerful black box is just that.  Hence when you are deciding to choose your peripherals you should take into consideration certain parameters like quality, what you are willing to commit in terms of price, frequency of usage and of course the programs you intend to run.

Taking printers for example, it may be that you intend to run a small home office.  In which case you will want to buy an all-in-one monochrome laser printer which will get you high quality print outs that will make your business look good on paper. You can get very high quality color print outs of many documents for very affordable prices at VistaPrint, hence a color laser printer is not recommended for home office use.   With an all-in-one laser printer you will not have to worry so much about faxing and the occasional copying.  Laser printers are known for high speed printing in addition to ink cartridges that lasts you for several thousand pages.  If on the other hand your computer is for home use and you are a digital photography buff, then one of the newer photo printers out there may be what you want.  These can be either laser or jet printers depending on your preference and what you are willing to spend.  Some of the best ink-jet color printers come from HP and awesome but expensive laser color printers are sold by Xerox.

Home networking is the norm these days.  The wireless networking revolution is no longer in the domain of office buildings.  You can have you very own wireless networking in the comfort of your home.  Having purchased your high speed Internet connection and depending on the number of computers in your home, you might consider buying a wireless

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