If you are still unclear after getting a one word response, ask your aquaintance 'what kind of system' they have. Geeks love spouting off knowledge, so be prepared to hear anything from:

"Uhm... Gateway? You know, the one with the cows..." to

"Well, I bootmanage between Redhat, openBSD, 98, NT4 (patched) and OS/2 Warp - it all runs on my dual celery 400 pushed to 480 with peltier coolers, 512 ram at 120mhz on a BP6 Board, two 60 gig RAIDs and a 16x CD-r... Uhmm... Voodoo4, SB Live! Gamer, Boomslang Mouse on USB and 5.1 surround Altec Lansings with an external subwoofer. Uhmm... JVC? You know, the one with 200 watts. That's my main system, anyway."