| Author | Message | ||
     Maxbuell |
Old PC just puked out 9 yrs old Sony Vioa or something like that. Need a new one nothing fancy manily surf the web and wife does alot of music. apprieciate any input. thanks. | ||
| Boogiman1981 |
Raspberry Pi | ||
| Biffdotorg |
Computer shopping has gotten easier for sure. Now just pick the amount you care to spend. 90% of them will do anything the home user will want to do. I've been selling technology for 20 years now. Go for the things that make the experience better for you, don't put all the weight on speeds and feeds. If shopping for a laptop, get a keyboard and screen combination that is comfortable and easy to read in the locations you will use it. If shopping for a desktop, put more money in the items that are more expensive to upgrade. Like a larger, better quality monitor. Buy a mid-range processor, or find the sweet spot to get performance without paying for bleeding edge. Good luck! | ||
| Mr_grumpy |
Just remember, If it's in the shops now & not got a premium price on it as the latest & greatest, it's obsolete. Not that that matters, I do fine with this little Acer "Aspire one" netbook for most stuff. Unless you absolutely "must have" the latest or you want it for professional use, cheap & cheerful will likely be good enough. | ||
| Hootowl |
Get a laptop or a netbook. Portability is nice. And spring for an SSD. Your battery will last longer, and they are massively faster, and more reliable. | ||
| Aesquire |
I generally buy stuff like Processors on what I call "the knee". If you look at the prices, you'll see ( for example ) $80, $100, $110, $125, $190, $250, etc. If you graph that, ( I just do it in my head... too many years of Statistical Process Control stuff ) you see the line bend abruptly at the $125 mark. And go up hard from there. Assuming a fairly flat line of performance up the price range, the bang for the buck is at the $125 mark. Currently a half decent Intel i3 series chip has enough power for most users, Except gamers and folk who do photo/video processing. Even gamers can have more than enough with an i3- and put the money saved into a better video card. If you don't game, and are into video editing, more power in the CPU makes sense. If not... Really, surfing and playing youtube doesn't need that much power. If you have a bud who's good at bolting the pieces together, ( or you are ) it's cheaper to build from scratch ( NewEgg Loves me ) than buy a package..... in a mid to upper performance level. Low end ( but usable ) computers from Dell, Hp, etc. are cheaper from Sam's Club or Costco. I agree with Biffdotorg, Put the money into a good large enough monitor that's full 1080p Hd capable, and a rig that can pump video to the TV by HDMI cable. If it's budget driven ( and what isn't? ) I last year built a buddy a rig with an i3, and a GTX450 for under $500. He already had monitor, keyboard, etc. I spec'd it out for excellent video feed to his Plasma TV, and enough gaming performance for his wife to play Elder Scrolls, etc. IIRC it was about $125 for chip, about the same for video, $45 for case, and the rest was mama board, memory, and DVD. Todays choices would be different, as would where the "knee" is. Biffdotorg, Feeds and speeds? Must have been a machinist. | ||
| Jramsey |
For a laptop I picked up one of these last fall,liked it so well I bought another last month for the wife for her birthday. http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results. phtml?product_id=0388735 I ended up getting one of these to replace my old Dell desktop,being house brand it comes without pre-installed bloatware. http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results. phtml?product_id=0378290 | ||
| Biffdotorg |
Speeds and Feeds is definitely a saying used in my field all the time. It's funny when I have a client asking me for a quote on 100-500 desktops for their company and they just read the latest Best Buy ad. They shoot speeds and feeds at me like the difference between a 2.4Ghz and 2.5Ghz processor is going to make his staff type faster! So many folk don't realize that most of those "specs" won't make their Internet pipe any quicker and a "gaming machine" will not make Farkle load quicker on Facebook! You guys are all on the same page. Save the bleeding edge stuff for the professional graphic artists and hardcores that actually run apps that can utilize it. |
