Buying a New Computer Now -- What Should I Buy? -- Talk at The Kinnelon Library Wed. December 18, 2019 @ 7 PM

In The Market for a New Computer???

High End Computer -- Possibly Too Expensive

I get asked about what new computers are good choices to buy a lot, and I do have choices to recommend. And I have reasons for my choices. Most people, when looking for a new machine give too much weight to the initial purchase price, forgetting that over the life of the machine, there are other costs that can drive the total price a lot higher. Such as upgrades and repair. OF course, the price is important, too.

The first thing to remember is that the Most Expensive Thing about a New Computer will be ... Replacing it. The longer your machine lasts, the cheaper it gets! I mean "lasts", both in terms of being powerful enough, and working long enough.

It used to be that a computer might die before it became too slow or old to use, and a desktop or laptop at 7 years old or older running Windows XP was common. That's an old computer from a hardware standpoint and likely to fail. These days the burden placed on a new machine is getting heavier so rapidly, that, unless you buy a moderately powerful computer, it is likely to be unuseable for websurfing, online purchasing, or many common programs and services long before it is even 3 years old. 

Buy the most powerful computer you can reasonably afford -- the difference in price may only be a few hundred dollars, but that will translate into a much longer and more useful lifespan, as well as a machine that waits for you, instead of you waiting for it.

Buy Computers with Core i7 or Core i5 (Mobile) Intel CPUs, or AMD Ryzen 5 or 7 (Mobile) CPUs instead of Core i3 or lesser processors -- they are more powerful  and that makes a difference. Buy a computer with at least 8 GB of RAM or more, expandable to 16 GB or more (RAM is and will be cheap), and with at least a 500 GB SSD, or preferably 1TB.

There is a special issue now to consider with Solid State Drives, which you will want over the old mechanical spinning disks, and that is Size-Based Longevity. Whereas it did not use to make a difference how large the drive was in terms of how long it lasted, now it does. Because SSDs are limited to the number of writes they can perform before failure, and warranted for that in TBW, Terabytes Written, they are built to spread the writes over the whole drive evenly over time and minimize the number of times that data is written to individual cells in the SSD. So if you have a 500 GB drive and 400 GB of data, the drive will not be able to spread the load as much over time as if you had a 1 TB SSD, and you will exceed both the warranty, and the lifetime of the drive sooner than you may expect!

One Laptop I like and recommend is the HP Envy x360 machines seen below:

For the moment, these links seem to work, although they will not for too long:

https://store.hp.com/us/en/ConfigureView?catalogId=10051&langId=-1&storeId=10151&urlLangId=&catEntryId=3074457345619215318&quantity=1

https://store.hp.com/us/en/ConfigureView?catalogId=10051&langId=-1&storeId=10151&urlLangId=&catEntryId=3074457345619366819&quantity=1

https://store.hp.com/us/en/ConfigureView?catalogId=10051&langId=-1&storeId=10151&urlLangId=&catEntryId=3074457345619366821&quantity=1

Specs:AMD Ryzen 7 3700U 4.0 GHz 4-core CPU, 8GB RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD, Wireless-AC, Bluetooth, AMD Radeon 8 graphics, 1-year warranty, and Windows 10 Home

Both the AMD Mobile 3500 3700 offer equivalent or better performance than the older 8th and 9th gen Intel Core i5, and i7 CPUs, whereas 10th Gen Intel Core i7 have been measured to do better at lower power than the AMD chips but at a somewhat higher price.

This computer is discounted now by HP for $819.99, or as I like to call it, $820. No discount code is needed.

Do get on the TechBargains, and ExtremeTech Mailing Lists for up to date notice of good deals. Do check Dell and HP for re-furbished Grade A machines with full warranty. Do check on Amazon for computers and monitors sold by Amazon with damaged boxing. I don't like buying computers from Amazon because the sellers are most often not warranted by the manufacturer because the sellers are not authorized. It pays to check. Some sellers are.

I got my beautiful new 32" 4k Samsung 1 millisecond response time, HDR10 monitor for over a $100 off just by checking to see "Other Sellers" and choosing one with a "Damaged Box". Same warranty, same equipment. The seller was Amazon. Don't care that the box was torn!

Don't buy a monitor by checking a box on the Dell or HP webpage -- those prices are too high. Check out the Tech Bargains website.

I will be giving a talk at the Kinnelon Library on this and other computers that I like this Wed., Dec. 18, 2019 at 7 PM. I will cover the following topics:

• What Computers Should You Buy Now?

• Tablets, Laptops, and Desktops

• How Much Should You Pay and Where Should You Buy Them

• What Computers Will Last the Longest Time

•What Do You Need if You Just Want to Surf the Web and Do Email?

And, as usual, we will have Question and Answer: Ask Your Questions, Bring in Your Laptop or Device for advice.

All of you Kinnelon and North Jersey people, and everybody else, are welcome to come.


Call the Kinnelon Library at 973 838 1321 and reserve a spot.


~Ted

Disaster Recovery for Home/Small Business Computing

Unforeseen Disasters: It's Not the Teeth It's the Slobber

    We will be giving a talk at the Kinnelon Library on October 30, 2019 from 7 PM

    to around 8:150 PM to discuss Quick Disaster Recovery in Win 10 with OS and 

    3rd party tools - here is the outline:

   

  What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?     

   It's Insurance Against the Loss of Data, Time & Money

   It's Being Able to Replace Your Hardware and Your Software Quickly

   It's Getting Working Again ASAP

   And it Includes:

•Backing Up -- Casper 10 Image Backup / Windows Backup (Control Panel)

•Making a Recovery Disk (Flash Drive)

•Having Your Product Key (License)

•Making Sure Your Data is Protected from Corruption or Attack

•Storing Critical Files Offsite – If Need Be  🤷‍♂️

•Having a Plan to Get Up and Running Quickly -- What Will You Do?

•Protecting from Most Likely Failures Absolutely – Best Guessing the Rest

•Having Quick Access to Correct Replacement Hardware

•Knowing How to Quickly Transfer Programs and Data to New and Different Hardware

•Knowing that Your Plan Works – By … Testing It! As Much As You Can

When Do You Need the Plan?

Think of all the things that can go wrong with your equipment or software!

Fire, flood, failed hardware, corrupted data, stupid stuff, lost or stolen equipment -- 

Essentially you need to be able to replace or fix any part of your hardware or software

as quickly as you can.

What Stuff Do You Need?

You should have a recent bootable disk image backup of your Boot Drive - there are a

 number of reputable suppliers of disk imaging software -- I like Casper 10 from Future

Future Systems Development, which is about $60, and worth every penny. You will also

need an external drive to backup to. It can also make virtual, bootable drives as files

or copies of any other recognized drive.

You need at least a 32 GB Flash Drive.

Don't have your product key? You need Magic Jelly Bean Keyfinder! It's free.

You need decent security software. I like Windows Defender which you already own

if you have Win 10. You do not need for-pay basic coverage. I also like Malwarebytes

which you can try for 2 weeks at no charge. Malwarebytes works well with other

security software and does not disable it, as some conventional software does.

You can store critical files online with OneDrive to protect them from local issues.

OneDrive can be weird though, so don't always expect it to be available. Smile!

Answer the question! If anything breaks, or your OS is compromised, what will you do?

So if you end up with a new computer, how will you replicate your previous program installs,

your data, your cookies/web pages, browser history, and so on? An archival file backup won't

do it. And you can't boot your new machine to your old system's drive! You will need

another piece of commercial software: PC Mover from LapLink which costs about $60.

Luckily you don't need it 'til you do, and you can download it to a flash drive and

install it on your new machine. Then you get to transfer all of your files, apps, and

settings to the new PC. From your Casper Image Backup! It works!

As usual, we will take questions and deal with issues at the end of the talk.

See you there!

~Ted