My last article about How to make an inexpensive & efficient Computer was praised by many readers. Now that PC was meant to be a one stop solution for everything you can think of. It was a gaming machine, music device, HTPC, all in one. But I was thinking, how low can you go?

In the market there are many people who want to buy a cheap PC for their home for kids or to get online once in a while or for the kids to study for school stuff like some HTML or C++ or to use in the office for Office suites. They don’t even open there computer every day, so they won’t require the previous configuration of PC I mentioned. This is another PC configuration for such use, office & cyber cafes where compatibility is required but high end components are not required & no one plays games on these PCs but still there is a small upgrade path. One thing for sure, this PC is going to be a looker in sleekness & style.

CPU = Intel Pentium Dual Core E2180 or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+. These CPU will not win any benchmarks or contest for number crunching but still at a very low price you will get a Dual Core CPU from Intel & AMD with enough horse power for your day to day tasks.

Motherboard = My personal preference is Asus P5N MX for Intel or Asus M2N-CM  DVI for AMD. These are very low cost yet stable motherboards based on nVidia 7050 chipset. They have most of the component ever required on board already like on board LAN, sound & graphics & people don’t even need to go beyond this. Whatever you need this small & cost effective PC to do, this motherboard will help you.

Another option if the above Asus motherboard are not available is Intel DG31PR motherboard.

CPU fan = No need to spend extra money, the Stock CPU fan from Intel & AMD are good enough. If you still want to spend some money on a good & silent CPU Cooler than simply get Cooler Master Hyper L3.

RAM = 2X1 GB DDR2 667 MHz RAM. Any cheap brand like Dynet, Simmtronics or Kingston Value RAM would do the job. It should cost you a maximum of Rs 1,600 for 2 GB RAM.

Cyber Cafe owners should just go for 1 GB DDR2 667 RAM.

Cabinet & SMPS = iBall Baby 306 is my preferred CPU Cabinet for this PC. Not only it is very small in size but also sufficient for this PC. Just get any 500W SMPS like one from Frontech or ColorSit. These SMPS aren’t very powerful but then you don’t require powerful SMPS and these provide adequate electricity for this PC. Install a 80 MM fan on the side & rear exhaust & keep the cabinet in horizontal position not vertical.

UPS = Get an APC 650VA UPS which can easily provide up to 10 minutes backup.

Cyber cafe owners should skip this & use a unified inverter.

Hard Disk = It depends on the user but 160 GB should be enough for such PCs to start with. Get a Western Digital WD1600AAJA SATA 2 Hard disk with 8 MB buffer, it should cost around Rs 2,000.

Cyber Cafe owners should look for old 40 GB or 80 GB hard disk which they can buy 2nd hand for Rs 800.

Optical Drive = There are many optical drives in the market right now but one Drive which is enough for this computer’s needs would be Samsung SH-S203D DVD Writer at Rs 1,200.

Cyber cafe owners need not to install any optical drive on the nodes. Just one at the server is sufficient.

Audio & Video = The onboard Audio & Video of this motherboard is all anyone will ever require in an office or home where computer is used once in a while only. The onboard graphics on Intel DG31PR which  Intel GMA X3100 & on the Asus motherboards are nVidia GeForce 7050 which are enough to run Windows Vista with Aero.

If you still want to buy a graphics card for home use then a low profile Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 3450 based graphics card with 256 MB RAM should be adequate.

Onboard Audio is Realtek 5.1 channel which again is sufficient because most users will either use a headphone or 2.1 channel speaker setup with such computer.

TV Tuner Card = Buy it if you need it else leave it. I would recommend Leadtek Winfast TV2000XP Global Media Center with my eyes closed as this TV Tuner is by far the best analog TV Tuner card I have seen. It is compatible with Windows Media Center & even comes with a Media Center Remote. If you can find the PCI Express X1 based WinFast PxTV1200 Media Center Edition then buy that instead to use that idle PCI Express X1 slot to some good use. You can also use these TV Tuners with the DTH service such as Tata Sky or Dish TV

Speakers & Headphones = This is a completely personal choice & I would advise you to go to the market & check yourself after listening to some available models. Since you are looking for a Value PC then buying a 5.1 channel speaker system doesn’t make sense. Entry level Altec Lansing & Creative Models are what you should look for. My personal choice although is Creative Gigaworks T20 or Creative I-Trigue T3000 for Stereo Sound but they will cost you about Rs 4,000 easily.

Webcam = Buy it if you need it. These days webcam start for as low as Rs 500 in the market. Considering the state of Indian broadband, a Microsoft LiveCam VX-1000 should suffice or Frontek Webcam which are surprisingly good for the price at Rs 500.

Keyboard & Mouse = Again, this is a personal preference. Look yourself to judge which keyboard & mouse you find comfortable with your hands & posture. A good & low cost yet effective keyboard is Zebronics Desktop Commander Keyboard which has laptop like keys & is easy on the hands. iBall Laser Precise Speedster mouse is a good low cost laser mouse which works surprisingly well within Rs 1,000.

Cyber cafe owners should go for Logitech Internet Desktop wired edition. A very cheap combination of wired keyboard & Mouse.

Monitor = Despite of this PC being a Value PC I will not recommend a CRT Monitor due to their sheer size & power requirements. LCD Monitors are dirt cheap now so it makes perfect sense to invest in a LCD Monitor instead of a CRT now as monitors easily last for many years & is generally the last hardware component to upgrade.

For Home use buy the LG L206WTQ Monitor. It is 20” TN Panel based but HDCP compliant. You can easily upgrade to a Blu-ray Drive later & still enjoy all your HD Movies as Blu-Ray requires a monitor with HDCP connection. It has a native resolution of 1650X1080 pixels which is more than enough for whatever you want to throw at it, even 720p HD Videos play flawless on this monitor as 1080p will look different from 720p only when seen on a 32? or higher LCD Display. You can also connect your gaming console such as XBOX 360 or Playstation 3 to this monitor to play games on a wide screen LCD with real HD resolution.

Cyber cafe owners should go for 17" LCD from Samsung or LG with 4:3 aspect ratio. They won’t need a widescreen monitor in a cyber cafe. CRT monitors are also an option if you want to go dirt cheap but I seriously don’t recommend buying CRT anymore.

Operating System = For home use 32bit Windows Vista Home premium is adequate for this computer. Once installed & configured for which you can have a look at my article “Using Windows Vista: The MVP Way” & your setup will be like Set it & forget it. Just start the system, work on it & do whatever you want.

For Cyber Cafe, Windows XP SP3 is advised.

We all know that people in Cyber cafe or casual home users in home pirate the OS anyway so instead of going with Linux & a new environment they would rather prefer going with Windows XP.

About other software, most of the basic home related work can be done these days with free software available for Windows. Some of them are Open Source applications like OpenOffice which will do the work just fine instead of Office 2007. This will further cut software cost & you don’t even have to pirate stuff.

That’s it, I can’t see the slogan “Intel Inside, Idiot outside” coming true & then users blaming Windows just because they don’t know how to work on Windows. No operating system in this world is good enough out of the box, you always need to make it good by installing or removing things you need & don’t need. This is a process which will sure take some time but the process is easy & you can save the files & settings so that you don’t need to do it again & simply use the old settings.

There is a way I use my computer due to which I don’t need to install Windows again & again, like many people do. In my case, it works when I want it to, the way I want it to. I decided to share my deployment expertise here which might help other Windows Vista user. I don’t use many paid applications now, & also use some OSS applications where applicable, so I am making this tutorial in a step by step way.

1) Install Windows Vista, then go to Windows Update & install every update available.

2) If you have a Bluetooth adapter, then don’t forget to install BlueSoleil 5. It is a must have application for all your Bluetooth needs. Although you can transfer & receive files without BlueSoleil in Vista too but since it is an OEM bundle, chances are you already have it bundled with your Bluetooth adapter.

3) Make sure you use Ad Muncher, it is a must have application for Windows Vista. Just install it, then run it & forget it, it won’t bug you & do its work automatically. Vista comes with Windows Defender which is good enough for removing Adware & Spyware. If you want something else, there are many free tools to choose from but once you start using Ad Muncher, you won’t need an Adware cleaner & you can very well disable Windows Defender.

4) The best torrent client for Windows is un-doubtfully µTorrent. It us low on resources, works the way you want it to work & even provides a WebUI for controlling it even when you are away from the computer. Start it, configure the way you want it like setting downloaded files fodler, enable port forwarding & that’s it. Just double click on a torrent file & it will do the rest automatically without bugging you. A very good Vistaish skin for uTorrent is the nCore suite.

5) For CD Burning you will be satisfied & surprised by InfraRecorder. It is a very small & simple, easy to use CD Burner with support for writing Audio & Video CD out of the box. It can also make CD Images of your optical CDs. For mounting Virtual CDs there is no better solution then DAEMON Tools for Windows. It hardly has any front end & runs simply from the tray. Install it, then right click on any disk image & select to mount it.

6) A must have Add-on for Internet Explorer 7 in Vista is IE7 Pro, it has one very small but effective Download Manager integrated which works very nicely with IE 7. If this isn’t sufficient for you then you can always use Orbit Downloaded. To view the loaded cookies in Windows you can use Cookie Monster.

7) When it comes to IM clients, I recommend using the official IM client due to more features available compared to something like Pidgin. You can also have a look at Digsby as it is also like Pidgin, an all in one IM Client but unlike Pidgin, Digsby supports voice & webcam chat too.

8 ) For your Image Viewing & Management tasks, you can rely on the inbuilt Windows Photo Gallery or something like Pictomio which uses the power of WPF in Vista. If you can pay, then there is nothing better than ACDSee 10 for Windows. You can also use Paint.net which is by far the best free Image editing application for Windows Vista.

9) When it comes to system maintenance, Tune-up utilities is the all in one solution that I use. However you can also use separate applications for maintenance I haven’t tested any other application then CCleaner.

For Registry Cleaning, a simple & effecting solution is Eusing Free Registry Cleaner

For registry defragmenting use Free Registry Defrag/Compact

You can use either the inbuilt defragmentor or use any free defragmenting application like Defraggler or Auslogics Disk Defrag.

10) You must be having a mobile phone, right. If it is Sony Ericsson then make sure you see MyPhoneExplorer & if it is Nokia then make sure to install Nokia PC Suite for managing everything in your phone.

11) A very good & lite PDF reader is Foxit PDF reader , it’s only 2 MB & works wonders however it is good only for simple text PDFs, not those with inbuilt movies or interactive content. For that you should use Adobe Reader which is very fast now & even supports hardware acceleration in Windows Vista something which Foxit lacks. For printing to PDF, have a look at BullZip PDF printer with Ghostscript 8.6. Install it & then you can print any document or web page to PDF.

12) For all your Multimedia needs just install K-Lite Codec Pack. It has FFDShow inbuilt which is the only decoding engine you will ever need. For more formats like Quicktime & Real Media, just install Quicktime Alternative & Real Alternative. These codec come without the player so you can simply use Windows Media Player 11 or Media Player classic to play the videos.

13) The inbuilt security in Vista is quite beefed up, in most cases the default ones are enough. Still if you want to have control over the system, then just install Comodo Personal Firewall which is free for home use. You already have Ad muncher installed so with this firewall it is a killer combination. For your anti virus needs, I would recommend NOD32, the best anti virus for Windows Vista I have ever used. It’s very light on resource usage. For storing your passwords, you can either use Keypass or AI Roboform. Most of the time I have my anti virus disabled & I run it only when I plug in a pen drive of a friend or a CD. It’s advisable to download Applications etc from reputed sources like Download.com or FileHippo or Fileforum.

14) The Media center application in Vista will take care of all your PVR needs; you can even record TV using it. If your TV tuner card is not supported then have a look at ChrisTV or Media Portal, which is equally good.

15) For converting videos from one format to another, you can use SUPER, although I use Riverpast video cleaner.

16) A must have UI enhancer for Vista is Vize. Install it after you have installed every update for Windows. Vista comes with inbuilt sidebar which brings gadgets to Windows, but if you want a bigger library of Widgets, considers using Yahoo Widgets.

17) Windows Vista comes with Windows Mail inbuilt but it lacks support for Windows Live Mail in it. A better solution is Windows Live Mail desktop using which you can check & access your Yahoo, Gmail & Windows Live Mail. It’s quite simple to use & an All in one E-Mail Client.

18 ) For saving contacts, you can use Windows Contacts. It integrates with WLM Desktop so you don’t have to worry about syncing.

19) For archiving purpose WinRAR is the best but it is paid, however another good & free solution is jZip which integrates in Windows like it is a part of Windows. The shell integration is better than WinRAR. It can open RAR files too, just that you can only make Zip files using it.

20) You can use Winmpy FLV player for playback of FLV files like those downloaded from YouTube.

21) RSS Feeds are a very good way to stay in touch with latest news & articles. Although you can use any of the RSS reader application out there like FeedDaemon etc, but Windows Vista already has a RSS feed reader inbuilt, it’s in IE 7. A simple & easy to navigate RSS feed reader.

22) You can simply use TCPOptomiser to optimize the internet settings of your computer. Just select the speed of your internet connection & select Optimal Settings, then reboot.

23) GSpot is a free utility which identifies the codec required to play an AVI file and supplies other information as well.

24) For recording what you do on the screen I use Snag-It, but you can also use Jing which is free. The only problem is that it saves in Flash video format.

25) If you are like me, chances are you are running Windows Vista as your primary & only OS. However, many times you might need to check your application or design or web site or anything in Windows XP. In this case I prefer using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 with SP1 & Windows XP SP3 Virtual PC image provided from Microsoft which you can freely get & use it to test your stuff in a virtual Windows XP environment. Although you can also run Linux virtually in Virtual PC 2007, I do not recommend it. Instead have a look at Sun xVM VirtualBox. You can install Windows, Linux & BSD in VirtualBox easily.

A quite extensive TweakGuide for Vista can be found here.

Vista has inbuilt instant search but if you manage it like me, you will not need that. I am assuming that you only have 2 partitions in your computer, one C drive for Windows & another E drive for files.

1) Make some folders in E drive named Music, Movies, Documents, Software, Backup, Download, Pictures. Now go to C:\users\your username\ Right click on the appropriate folders & go to properties, then the location tab, then set the location to the folders created in E drive.

The benefit of this is that you don’t have to worry about backing up your data in case of a Virus breakthrough or corrupt windows installation. All you have to do is to insert the vista DVD & repair. All your documents will remain safe.

2) Make a folder inside the folder Backup in E drive with the name “Application files”. This is where you should save your application files like Firefox profile folder, or Windows Live Mail Desktop data folder. This way the application settings will remain same even if you reinstall Windows. In case you have to migrate to a laptop or new computer, just copy the files there. The method to change the folder location should be there in Options or Preference of the application. Like in ACDSee, the option to change the location of Database folder is in Tools->Options-> Database. Just give the path of this application folder & it will take care of the rest.

3) Copy all your songs to the Music folder & videos to Movies folder. Now open WMP 11, Go to tools -> Library -> Monitor folders & give the path of these 2 folders. WMP11 will automatically add new files placed in these folders to the library.

4) Make a shortcut of the download folder & put it in the folder

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\ SendTo

This way you don’t need to copy files individually when you are trying to copy files from different locations to a particular location. Just right click on files placed in various locations & select downloads from the Sendto Menu. After this just copy the files at once from the download folder to where ever you like.

5) Make a habit of copying downloaded applications or files or documents to their proper location. Like make a folder named Office in the E:\Documents\ folder & place all your office related files there only. This simple task makes life easy.

6) Once Vista is installed, Disable DEP. To do this, go to Start -> Run -> Type “CMD” & enter this command.

bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOff

7) Don’t install applications in the default path of program files. Instead, make folders like “User Interface”, “Security” in Program Files folder & install the applications inside them. For example, this is how my Program Files folder looks like, all application released to security such as Firewall, NOD32, Ad Muncher & AI roboform are installed inside the Security Folder, while Codec Pack & Riverpast suite is inside the “Studio” folder.

8 ) Instead of Shutting down the system, Hibernate it.

9) Make links to frequently used folders in the Sidebar of explorer

10) Start up Regedit and navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control]

On the right pane look for the "WaitToKillServiceTimeout" string and change its value to 5000 . Default value is 20000.

11) Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\explorer, Create a new string called Max Cached Icons & give it a value of 10000.

12) To change the reserved bandwidth by Windows go to gpedit.msc then to Local Computer -> Administrative Templates -> Network -> QoS Packet Scheduler -> Limit reserved bandwidth Then enable it & change the bandwidth to 0

13) Disable Auto Play from control Panel. This will save you from the nasty virii like Brontok etc which spread via Pen drives.

14) I am not much into gaming these days, but Microsoft started a new program with Vista called, Games for Windows. Once you install a compatible game it automatically shows up in Games explorer, if u run he game from here then Vista automatically disables unused resources, DWM & indexing service for games to run faster & better. If a game is not detected then either follow this tutorial or use Vista Game Explorer Editor.

Well, this is just part of how I use my Windows Vista system & how it stays top notch even after months of usage, I will be adding more to this guide soon about how I have made it easy to run Windows here. There are lots more tricks & tweaks, but this is how I use Windows.