ERRIT VOOREN braved an icy Manhattan morning last week to press his search for just the right new computer. It had to be powerful, crammed with hundreds of megabytes of memory, and have enough hard-drive space to hold a vast music library and hours upon hours of digital video.

For Mr. Vooren, a 40-year-old native of the Netherlands who moved to New York 16 years ago to pursue acting and visual art, his new computer essentially had to do what his old one could barely manage: handle the latest high-performance programs to help him edit short films in his Brooklyn apartment, where he recently started a business, Reels 4 Artists. A DVD burner was essential, too, to save the video onto disks.

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"Smoke was coming out of the back of my computer," at least in the figurative sense, he recalled. "What I was doing with it was more than it could. It was just too much for it."

He replaced his aging Apple PowerBook G3, which ran on a single 400-megahertz processor, with a $2,000 Apple Power Mac G4, which uses two processors, each running at more than twice the power of his old computer's central processor. A 17-inch, $700 flat liquid crystal display replaced his old tube-based monitor.

It is shoppers like Mr. Vooren, and their demanding needs, that personal-computer makers hope will end their sales doldrums.

For the first two decades of the PC era, a fairly steady cycle prevailed: a succession of innovations (like the spreadsheet), opportunities (like getting on the Internet) or new operating systems (like Windows 95) drove waves of computer buying as each generation's processors, memory and hard drives proved unequal to new tasks.

But after peaking in 2000 at 16.4 million, the number of computers sold in the United States has declined two years in a row, to an estimated 13.8 million last year, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.

Consumers "just had no reason to buy," said Justin Udelhofen, a research assistant for Needham & Company. The advent of the World Wide Web stimulated PC sales in the 1990's, Mr. Udelhofen said, but by 2000 that buying cycle had played out, along with the economic boom.

Now the elements may be in place to inspire a new wave of interest in upgrading. As the average price of a new PC continues to fall - to $835 last year, roughly half the outlay of six years earlier - an army of power-hungry software programs are beginning to explode the boundaries of what those computers can do.

Those who see the tide turning make this case: high-performance applications like Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition are transforming computers into ever more sophisticated music studios, digital darkrooms and video-editing bays - even so-called entertainment servers that can record and play back television shows with the touch of a special remote control.

But such uses require up-to-date operating systems and processors. And the very volume of digital photos and music that consumers are using PC's to store and transfer to and from other devices is also feeding a demand for bigger hard drives. With factors like those, the electronics association is projecting a modest increase in sales this year, to 14.3 million.

Some computer industry analysts, however, warn that it is likely to take more than flashy new applications to lift computer sales significantly anytime soon.

Andrew J. Neff, an analyst at Bear, Stearns & Company, said it was too early to see now, but that an upturn in computer sales would be more apt to happen when broadband and wireless computing becomes more prevalent as well as home networking of computers sharing those high-speed connections. "It's never one thing," he said, "but a combination of things that drive the market."

Still, as more software makes fuller use of late-model operating systems like Windows XP and Mac OS X, the industry seems optimistic about an eventual effect on PC sales.

"An ever increasing multitasking lifestyle and a set of killer applications in music and video as stand-alone products are definitely driving greater appreciation for power," said Ralph Bond, Intel's consumer education manager. He said that owners of low-powered computers only three to five years old often face a phenomenon he calls the "multimedia oven": the computer becomes so overwhelmed by a power-intensive task like making a music CD that it cannot do much else for an extended period.

Mr. Bond said consumers were growing impatient with having to "give up the machine for some kind of intense activity." The newest Intel Pentium 4 class microprocessors, for example, have more than enough power at two to three gigahertz to perform several intense tasks simultaneously, he said.

This year Intel is also introducing a technology called hyperthreading, which was first used on commercial servers. Hyperthreading is designed to boost computer performance significantly by handling software instructions as if the PC had two processors rather than one.

The effect of all this processing power, Mr. Bond said, will be "going from frustration to fun."

Kevin Wasielewski, vice president for marketing at Alienware, a maker of high-end computers that are a favorite of hard-core game players, said his company experienced a spike in sales with the release of any hot game that pushed the limits of current computers. "We have people waiting for the release of Doom 3 before they buy their next game PC," Mr. Wasielewski said.

Steve Thomas, a spokesman for Cakewalk, a Boston-based company that specializes in developing software for creating music and sound, agreed: "Faster is always better."

"The more horsepower of the processor and memory, the more unlimited possibilities are afforded the user," Mr. Thomas said.

He pointed to his company's latest virtual music studio, called Project 5, which is to reach store shelves late this month. Project 5, which allows even non-musicians to create rich, multi-tracked CD's from hip-hop to electronica to jazz, will work on computers with no more than 800-megahertz processors and 256 megabytes of random access memory. But Mr. Thomas said that computers with twice the power and memory would give users a far more satisfying experience.

"You need the hardware to do it," he said.

And more hardware is available for less money. Venancio Figueroa, a spokesman for Dell Computer, said that a Dell computer selling for $999 in January 2002 had a 1.7 gigahertz processor, 256 megabytes of RAM and a 20-gigabyte hard drive. For the same price this year, Mr. Figueroa said, a Dell customer could expect a 2.4 gigahertz process with 512 megabytes of RAM and a 30-gigabyte hard drive, along with other extras.

"Our view of what we're seeing here is not so much a price decrease, but a technology and performance increase," he said.

In Dell's case, that also means a sales increase in raw numbers: the company recently reported that 38 percent more units were sold in the fourth quarter of last year than a year earlier.

Carlos Arriaga, co-founder and chief technology officer of Digital-Reign, a Web site development company in Los Angeles, said he was seeing signs of a new techno-lust among shoppers.

"Every time I go to Best Buys, there have to be dozens of people buying computers to take home," Mr. Arriaga said. "It's not like they're geeks; they are people buying for home offices. You see mothers with children, husbands and wives, buying computers to run their home entertainment, to work with their photographs and things like that."

Here is a look at some of the potential uses for those computers.

Entertainment

Home computers that can record and replay movies and television programs from cable and satellite signals have been around for years. But they have largely been the purview of enthusiasts who purchased expensive, high-performance graphics cards and retrofitted their PC's to operate as digital video recorders. Even then, low-powered computers need not apply.

After noticing that consumers were increasingly using their home computers for music, pictures and video, Microsoft engineers created Windows XP Media Center Edition. It is an all-in-one approach that marries a variety of hardware components with enhancements to the Windows XP operating system.

"It is connected and enables media to go to lots of places," Joe Belfiore, general manager of Windows eHome division of Microsoft, said of the Media Center.

The system, licensed to some two dozen computer makers, comes with an infrared remote control that directs the PC - either on its monitor or on a television set elsewhere to which it is hard-wired - to display digital photos or video, or even programs and movies captured from television with the PC's own tuner card. It also offers functions like those found on TiVo and other digital television recorders, like pausing live action.

The high-powered Media Center computers, some of which feature Intel's new hyperthreading capability, can also play back digital music on the computer itself or on a linked stereo system, all while performing standard computer functions.

Sony makes a similar system called a Giga Pocket for its VAIO series of desktops. A $1,600 model has a 2.66-gigahertz Pentium 4 processor, one gigabyte of RAM, DVD-RW and DVD-ROM drives and a 120-gigabyte hard drive.

PC Games

When Wolfenstein 3D became a favorite among computer game players in the early 1990's, all of its programming fit on a 1.44-megabyte diskette and played on pre-Pentium computers. Recently that World War II-themed classic from Id Software was reborn as Return to Castle Wolfenstein. It now requires, at a minimum, computers with Pentium II processors and more than 500 times as much storage space - a full 800 megabytes on the hard drive - for its programming.

State-of-the-art computer games have long pushed consumers to upgrade their computers so they could literally stay in the game. Little has changed, said Mr. Wasielewski of Alienware, which promotes its PC's as "the ultimate gaming machine."

The machines are custom-made to take advantage of the latest, most sophisticated components, like high-performance graphics cards and processors, and can typically cost from $2,500 to $3,500.

Mr. Wasielewski said his current customers were waiting for Doom III (also by Id Software) to be released before they bought their next PC's. Spokesmen for Id have indicated that, unlike many games that aim for a mass market, the latest version of this spooky, futuristic battle game would aim higher, testing the limits of personal computers.

Unreal II: The Awakening, published this month by Infogrames Entertainment, is not unusual in its PC requirements: more than two gigabytes of hard-drive space and at least a two-gigabyte processor. A high-end graphics card, a Nvidia GeForce4, is recommended along with a computer that can produce Dolby sound.

Photos

One of the fastest-growing segments of the consumer electronics market in the last few years has been digital cameras: the Consumer Electronics Association projects that more than 11 million will be sold this year. And practically all digital cameras depend on the power of personal computers to edit, store, display and print their pictures.

But managing and organizing hard drives brimming with photo files has become daunting. New tools like Photoshop Album by Adobe are designed to make that much easier, says Johnnie Manzari, user interface designer for Adobe.

The software can handle tens of thousands of photo files, quickly sorting and grouping them by the date they were taken. Each picture can also be given simple tags and then organized or individually retrieved by the tags assigned. The program, which works best on Pentium III-class computers and higher with at least 128 megabytes of RAM, also helps fix photo flaws and archive photos on CD's and DVD's.

At a more basic level, Microsoft and Apple have incorporated digital photo management suites into their latest operating systems, Windows XP and Mac OS X. Neither will run on lower-powered computers.

Video

For capturing and editing digital video images, Apple's Final Cut Pro 3, which runs best on high-performance personal computers, is practically an industry standard. For Windows-based computers, Mr. Bond, Intel's consumer education manager, gives Pinnacle Studio Version 8 high marks for giving Hollywood-type editing tools to weekend filmmakers. Pinnacle Systems recommends that Pinnacle Studio be used on computers with at least a one-gigahertz processor and 256 megabytes of RAM and a high-end graphics card.

Other notable programs include Adaptec's VideOh!, the Ulead DVD MovieFactory 2, and Roxio's Easy CD and DVD Creator 6, a hard-drive-hungry suite of programs that can manage computer data backups, digital music, digital photos and video.

Kathryn Kelly, a spokeswoman for Roxio, said the product, released two weeks ago, was intended for novice-to-average computer users. Nonetheless, she said, "you definitely want to have a fast machine to do a lot of the video and photo work."

Music

Just as digital recording and mixing have invaded professional recording studios, digital music studios in a box are steadily finding converts among home-computer users who are learning that they can make music with the click of a mouse.

Mr. Bond said that while many of the newest music studio programs would run on Pentium III computers as well as more powerful Pentium 4's, users should "be prepared to wait" to hear the results on a slower machine. Multitrack mixing and recording are especially power-hungry, he cautioned, adding that some of the newest software takes advantage of the latest processor designs, including Cakewalk's Home Studio and Sonar 2.0 (for more advanced users), Steinberg's Cubase and Nuendo (for more advanced users).

For best results, Mr. Bond recommends using music-creation software on the PC in conjunction with U.S.B.-connected external digital-recording devices - sleek boxes that include high-performance sound cards and pre-amps like Aardvark's Q10 and M-Audio's Duo.