How to know when to buy a new computer
Expert Advice: Buying a new computer in 2023 | How to buy a computer | PC Shopping Guide
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Hi, my name is Jason. I've been an I.T. professional since 1992 and a lot of times my
customers ask me what they should buy when looking for a new computer, so I thought I'd make this
video to make it easy and clear to understand. So what I've learned is that most of the office
stores, including Best Buy tend to have a machine that's on sale at a great price. You might get
$200 off for no reason other than it's the sale of the week! So why not search around and find the
best deal we can get. The three really important things when picking out a computer are first,
the processor or cpu, that's basically the brain of the computer and does all the calculations.
So the faster that is, the faster the overall computer will be. Second will be how much memory
the computer has, and in most cases you want 8 or 16 gigabytes to have a machine that's up to spec.
And then third would be the hard drive type and size. These days there is a new drive called a
solid state drive and it has no moving parts and is hugely faster than those old mechanical drives
that we had years ago. With solid state discs you no longer have to wait many minutes for your
computer to boot up before you can use it, so if you buy a new computer, you MUST get one of those.
Not that you have to, but you'll regret it if you don't. So in shopping for a new computer,
I have up here different websites such as Office Depot, Best Buy, Staples. So let's take Office
Depot for example. On their website we would go to products, computers, and let's say we're in
the market for a desktop computer. I'll go ahead and click on desktop computers and let's say I've
already got a monitor and everything I need except for the tower. So let's search for a new tower
and a lot come up, 722 results, which is way too many so we want to narrow it down mainly by "In
stock for delivery" or "In store for pickup". So I see right here in store for pickup means you could
literally go to the store and see what it is. And those tend to be the more popular, current,
better selling models because it's good enough for them to keep it on their shelf it must be
a good machine and not yesterday's old news. So it looks like we've got 13 results. So what I
also look for, I don't have anything against AMD processors but I find the Intel processors are
just more straightforward on what you get. It's either the i3, i5 or i7 chip and the higher the
number you go the more powerful the processor and more capable it is. It has more cores and a bunch
of other things that make it faster so i'm going to only check Intel because AMD's product line is
a little more confusing to navigate & know what you're buying. So now we have sorted it down to
11 computers. We'll choose price, low to high and then I usually just skim the list looking
at the price. Of course we don't want to go over our comfortable level that we're going to pay
and we also want to see what the most computer we could get for the money is and possibly identify
a super sale that lets us get an extra $200 worth of computer without having to pay the extra $200.
So looking at this list here, I'm just going to get a feel for the high end and the low end.
So on the high end, the better higher processor is the i7. So I see that a really good setup
would be this right here Lenovo Idea Center. It's i7 which is great. That's the higher one there's
actually an i9 but most of the time you won't find that out there and don't need it unless you're
a real power user. This one has 16 gigabytes of memory which is really good. Normally 8 gigabyte
is standard and it's all you need but if you need extra power or you're doing intensive applications
like desktop publishing, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, you're gonna want more memory. So having more is a
benefit to you, so this machine does have the 16 gigabytes of memory. And then the really important
third thing is the hard drive. So the solid state drives are really fast and it's almost
a "must have" these days but they tend to come out in much smaller sizes than the old mechanical
drives. So this one for example has a 512 gigabyte solid state disc, which is half of a terabyte,
which if you're just a light user don't store tons and tons of photos and videos on your computer,
512 gigs is okay. It's usually the one you'll find commonly on the higher end in the stores.
I do prefer the 1 terabyte but that can add a lot more cost and it's harder to find. So this would
be an overall good system. As you can see, it's normally $949 and change, on sale for no reason
today $200 off for $750 so that would be one worth considering. Now let's say that that's over your
price range and you don't want to spend quite that much. You can go up the list since we're sorted
by price and then I'm just going to eyeball the processor and the RAM and the type of hard disk.
So first off, something that disqualifies a computer is if the hard drive is too small,
like a 128 gigabyte solid state disk. You don't want it. That's barely enough to load windows
and a few updates. 256 is kind of pushing it if you're not storing much at all and not saving tons
of photos. It might be okay for a while but better yet is 512 gigabyte. So looking at our list here
I see we have i5. Don't buy a Pentium, don't buy a Celeron. Those are very low powered chips that you
do not want. The i7 is great, the i5 is a midline good chip and sometimes even the i3s in in the
10th or 11th generation, they became very very fast over the years so you're not missing out
too much even if you get an i3. So the game is you just buy the fastest, highest one you can
find that has the specs that you want. So let's see if there's any bigger hard drives on there.
so i see that it's 256 okay one terabyte we'd want to make sure that is a ssd solid state disk
um one terabyte so those are worth looking at so let's say we have an i5 one terabyte
and they might even have a way to filter it out okay so what this means this computer has a one
terabyte mechanical drive but the boot drive that windows is loaded on is an in addition to the one
terabyte it's a 256 gig solid state drive so it'll boot up real fast windows is on that c
drive that will be 256 gigs and then there's another hard drive just sitting in the system that
uses the older slower technology but if you're just throwing your pictures and files on it
that's not a problem so this computer might be okay uh to to get like that so we'd have an i5
so plenty of speed we've got the eight gigs of memory which is pretty good the price is right
and you've got a total of one and a quarter terabyte of space with the fastboot drive so this
is actually a pretty good deal and as you can see 700 retail price marked down to 549.99 that might
just be the game they play but hey why not save some money and get more computer while we're at it
um the next thing you can do is once you've identified a good computer and a good model
you can go to competitive stores and do the same thing so to see what they offer so on
best buy you would click on the search click on computers tablets computers laptops and desktops
and all-in-one because remember we're targeting a desktop computer and a package will include a
monitor and everything most of the time people are just looking for the computers themselves so
i'll say all desktops and then we want to narrow it down a little bit because there's so many of
them i would just like to see the ones that are popular and the ones that really do sell so let's
just say pick up today what's in the store this will be an all-in-one meaning the monitor and
computer and all the components are integrated into the monitor i think those are neat but
if the screen breaks the whole computer shot so i tend to stay away from them
we want to sort this list by low to high and then scroll down usually under 500 is not gonna
have anything too desirable see we got the i3 the lower processor let's see if we can sort by
the manufacturer here we go intel i just do like the intel computers and i'll scroll down and it
looks like they have a big gap in their prices it goes from oh an open box that means it's not new
we only want new so we'll click that checkbox there so we have a jump up to 512 dollars and
i'm not much on the acer desktops so i'm going to skip that one this is an all-in-one
okay now we're shooting up over to 779 dollars so let's see what that is that might be a really good
computer and a really good buy actually i did sell this computer the other day and set it up
for a customer and it worked really well so this is the intel i5 chip 12 gigs of memory so that's
more than eight so that's a plus and then it says it has a one terabyte ssd so that is actually a
rare site uh for a manufacturer to have a pc under a thousand dollars that has a one terabyte ssd i
don't know why they charge so much because those chips are really not that expensive but they tend
to cost a lot when you buy it pre-configured so this would overall be a really good system uh with
great specifications um you know again the main things the processor is great the memory is good
the hard drive is ssd and it's very fast and large so i like this computer my customer was happy when
i sold it to them so again the same thing with staples you just go through the the same uh
methodology to identify search for computers narrow it down to those three things and see
what shows up you might find one one that you like so going back to best buy there this is a more
advanced trick i've pretty much told you all you need to know for the most part uh when choosing
the processor there's a lot of them out there but we're in the 10th and 11th generation or version
of them over the many years they've have different redesigns that make the chip faster and faster
so almost anyone you pick now is a very very fast computer compared to even like two or three years
ago but if we want to know for certain that one machine is faster than another computer
we can really geek out and put the processor into a website called cpubenchmark.net and it'll give
you a performance speed for each computer kind of like a speedometer when you want to compare
how fast is this one how fast is that one so what we would do on this hp envy desktop is scroll down
and try to determine exactly which processor it is so sometimes they're elusive with it and they'll
just say i5 but what you really need is this i5 and then the number the i5 dash and the numbers
so that's a 10th generation it's got the 10 000. we're going to copy that and then go over to pass
go to cpubenchmark.net scroll down and you can do search for your model now this page is very large
it has thousands of chips listed and we'll go ahead and paste into the box there click find cpu
and then we've got a number the one that exactly matches is this top one intel core i5 10 400 at
2.90 gigahertz and the performance speed using their system for comparing them is 12 399 or
we could just say around 12 000 as a speed um so it's often helpful to click on compare and then
this little guy shows that we we have that in our list and let's say we're comparing that to another
computer and we want to see which one's better so let's go back over to office depot we'll scroll
down and they had a computer right here this lenovo idea idea center so we'll pull that up
and see exactly which chip that is now it is i7 so i'd expect it to be faster than the other one
but it may not be that much faster so we're going to look in here and try to identify the exact chip
that is in this computer sometimes you actually have to go to the web and search in google but
again here it is i7 10700 so we'll copy that go back to our benchmark site um you can literally
just go back to the main page cpu benchmarks to get back where we were and search for a model
put in the name of this computer click find cpu and then find the exact matching one okay so this
one it has a speed rating of 17 253 which is a lot higher remember the other one was like 12 300. um
if you want to see them side by side you can click compare and that makes our little comparison scale
here have two items in it and you'll click on that and so here's a side by side so we have the i5
on the left i7 on the right we'll see that we would get performance specifications of 12 399
speed out of the i5 and 17 253 speed out of the i7 and if you think of it like a car
speedometer a higher number is going faster so this computer on the right the i7 would be the
better one to buy because for this i think it was the same price you're getting a lot more power
and so then again you can go back and review the pros and cons of this so we are getting a faster
processor the most amount of ram that usually you'll find we are getting less hard disk space so
remember this is a solid state drive which is very good but it's half the size of the other one so
as long as you're not storing tons of videos and pictures this would actually be a great buy and a
very fast computer so um these pre-built boxes are often great for home use for business use
um everything except like gaming the reason i say that is the ram and the processor are awesome
they're really fast up to speed and everything but because these are mass-produced boxes that
sell at a lower price in a retail store they're not really designed to be a game machine monster
itself you have to buy a real true game computer to get that kind of level the reason being
is that these computers have a power supply that say it might only be 250 watts or 210 watts which
is just enough to run the small little motherboard the processor and the ram and everything you need
to do everything you'd want to do but when you get into gaming that on board video chip just
isn't fast enough so you'd want to add a like an nvidia rtx 3000 series graphics card but what
you'll find is this computer does not have first doesn't have the room to even fit it on the inside
and second um the power supply isn't enough to power that card so as long as you're not trying to
game and do first person shooter games where you have to um you know performance is key this would
be an overall great system this is uh similar to what most of my customers have in their office and
they tend to last a good six to eight or more years and because there's a lot of memory in
adequate hard disk space and a fast processor they continue to keep up over the years so
anyway that is my summary on how to buy a pc at the different office stores there is a little
snippet i'll tell you about mac so the same things apply when you buy a mac this for example is the
imac desktop so you can just pull up their page on it review the prices find a good starting point
like let's say we want this middle one here so apple has their new m1 chip as you can see and
that chip actually is pretty darn fast you won't be disappointed with it so in a way that takes all
the guessing game about which processor to choose away so we'll select uh this middle one here
and then you'll just want to look at the um the upgrades so again first upgrade is memory eight
gigabytes is good but if you really want to have this machine last a long time and be fast in the
future when the internet and windows get even more bloated than it already is now
you can do the upgrades so for example to double the memory to make this one 16 gigs add 200 that
would be well worth it and then storage i would not touch it with 256 gigs i'd do at least a 512
ssd solid state or a one terabyte as you can see the price shoots up really high but this
is something that you cannot change later so if you buy mac you want the fast nice big one
right when you buy it otherwise you're stuck and you'll wish you had done that so um in this case
i'd probably say the 512 gig if you didn't have tremendous storage needs and then all the rest of
things are just accessories um and also when you buy a pc laptop the same three things apply the
processor the memory and the hard drives type and speed so those are the three variables that always
make the difference most of the other parts and pieces in the computer are standard like laptops
always have a webcam these days and you know most of the features they have are pretty standard
um desktops there's not much really to worry about other than the processor ram and storage so
hopefully this will help you guys uh know how to better
pick out and find a great deal on a really fast desktop or laptop computer and you can use
cpubenchmark.net to compare processors to really understand if you buy the one on the right
you're significantly faster than paying the same amount and buying the one on the left so
if you found this video useful please like the video and subscribe to my channel i appreciate
hearing any comments or questions you might have so feel free to leave them and i plan on
making more videos in the future so thank you so much for watching and have a great day take care
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