In addition, you'll need to figure in costs for maintenance, servicing, and insuring. 4. Start comparison shopping and look for the "fastest and biggest." By "fastest and biggest," we mean the computer with the fastest processor, the fastest modem, the biggest memory, and the biggest hard drive capacity. With shareware, cheap does not equal low-quality and there are plenty of examples that prove shareware often outperforms the quality of commercial software time and time again. How much savings are we talking about? You could purchase a quality word processor, spreadsheet, database program, or system utility anywhere from a mere $15 to under a hundred. But when one command conflicts with another command - or when one command asks for a process or information that isn't available, the computer returns results that aren't useable. That's an error. A prime example of this kind of error is when users attempt to use software that isn't applicable for their system. Waiting too long to accessorize can cause more problems than necessary because while you wait, manufacturers continuously develop new technologies - technologies that your computer won't be able to accommodate in the future. Once you're ready to accessorize, the new products on the market are too advanced for your computer and they just won't work. In the past, the warning was to avoid opening files from people that you don't know. Today it's really not safe to open files from anyone (without scanning the files) because that's how viruses get spread - through files - even by mistake. So even though your co-worker may have emailed a funny video, it's no more safe to open than a video downloaded from a complete stranger. Conditions allow a program to perform an action based on the outcome of a previous command.3 Using this type of instruction, we could instruct a program to do one thing if the "x" variable in our latter example turned out to be 7 days, and then do different thing if the variable turned out to be 3 days.