What is a good CPU and Motherboard for editing pictures, and what type of video card would I be looking at? Nothing top of the range, but something fairly decent thats going to last em a fair while... My girlfriends dad has just purchased a new digital camera and wants a computer for doing the following: The computer will only be used at home for editing pictures, surfing net occasionally, no games at all, doing homework...

anything made in the last 4 years can do that. still pictures, wordprosessing and net surfing doesn't take much power

For web surfing and word processing anything in th range of a Pentium 2 will do. However, when it comes to photo editing, a lot has to do with what program you are using, and what you want that program to do. If it is simply viewing pictures and making *minor* modifications, then a PII would probably suffice. That is assuming you use a program like Irfanview (www.irfanview.com). Its a very nice freeware program that works well as a viewer and has some decent editing tools. However, if you plan on using Adobe Photoshop or something like that, I would recommend at least a mid P3. I have Adobe 6 on my second computer (celeron 700) and it works well enough, so I recommend something bigger and more powerful than that.

For Photoshop, I prefer something with a CPU 1GHz or faster and a minimum of 256MB RAM. I prefer more than 512MB RAM and would choose RAM over CPU speed. Also, Photoshop images may be files 20MB or greater so have a fast HDD can be useful. I like 7200 RPM and ATA 100 or 133.

Photo editing, I use a 2000XP Athlon, 512 meg DDR333 and to be honest, I could STILL use more power (using JAsc Paintshop Pro). When I run animation shop, to make gifs, some effects still take 30 or so seconds to process (for example the stained glass backlit effect animation). But that is asking a lot from the CPU. With photo editing, liek the above says, if you just want to crop, cut, paste etc, you can do it on a P2 233mhz (we do with my wife's). If you want to do some serious stuff, get as powerful as you can afford, with 512 or more ram and Win XP (to handle the large amount of ram).

I use a Pentium, 120 MHz, with 48 MB RAM, using Slackware Linux, with the GIMP. BWAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!