Interesting article in USA Today from Matt Krantz, the publication's financial markets reporter and an expert on online investing. Matt offers up an unbiased answer to a reader's question: What's a better computer for online investing, a PC or a Mac?

Not surprisingly, Krantz advises that Windows Vista PCs  win "hands-down" over Macs for things like better software compatibility, better community support, IE and greater user productivity. And his fundamental point on cost should hit home for anyone (not just online investors) in the market for a new computer:

...For less than $500, you can buy a Compaq Presario CQ50Z laptop. It comes with a 1.9 GHz dual-core processor, 1 gigabyte of memory, an Nvidia GeForce graphics card, 120 gigabyte harddrive and wireless networking. A capable machine by today's standards and more than adequate for an online investor, for less than $500.

Now, let's see what's available from Apple. You'll need to spend at least $1,099 for a MacBook, which comes with the same memory and hard drive. The MacBook has a slightly faster microprocessor, 2.1 GHz, but you won't notice the difference if you're just Web surfing.

In this case, you save $600 that could be invested in stocks instead of sent to Cupertino...

For most people, a 156% price mark-up is too steep for admission to the club (and most people don't buy computers to join clubs anyway). Picking a Windows Vista PC over a Mac is no-brainer for business customers in particular - it's a smarter use of resources, offers hardware choice (something sorely lacking with Macs), and flexibility to use whichever applications make the most sense.

Education is one of the primary reasons to which computers were developed. For the aspiring student, doing their homework and doing research has never been easier considering that they can type and do computations through the various software such as MS Office installed in standard desktops.

Businesses as well have benefited and has become a learning experience. Imagine doing away with the standard manual means of doing business to produce timely business reports pertinent towards overall assessment business performance. Through computers, much of the reports have become easy to produce and pinpoint should there be figures up in question.

In all aspects of life, it shows that computers have surely showed the way. Children today should be happy that computers came to be during their time. Learning and enhancing their studies has opened a lot of doors as far as methods of learning is concerned. In short, a lot of time and methodologies make education these days totally advanced.

There are still families without computers and while they aspire to have one, finance constraints have become an issue. But just the same, they are provided proper exposure through schools today which are normally offering computer courses and lessons to familiarize students of their use and benefits as they progress.

Indeed, a computer is a child’s partner and is a good investment. All that really remains is knowing up to what extent you can invest on them. Whatever the amount would be, it is a good one considering it helps in practically all aspects of our life these days.