Couch works.
I’m a few hours late for this. I awoke today to find my laptop not powering on at all. Tried a few things. Gave up. And already went and bought a new one. At least I eliminated a problem with the charger before buying.
Now opening up my popcorn and seeing if Dope’s advice would have pointed me towards what I bought… Lenovo, 8Gb RAM, 17in IPS monitor, 1Tb hard drive from Best Buy. All for about $500.
I strongly recommend a solid state drive for the operating system. The performance increase is incredible.
As usual, there’s lots of what sounds to me like good advice. Many thanks for all the help. I had no idea where to start!
MizQuirk
I have Autism and Depression. Thus I have very little money.
Strange as it may seem the Amazon Fire tablet for $50 and Tri value tablet which I got for $40 have served me very well.
I got a 8 inch tio tablet for $40 – and it works well for over a year.
Hi MizQuirk
I just went through the same thing (7 year old computer dying, needed new one) and ended up buying a new desktop from Micro Center (https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=850914). Some advice from my experience:
[ul]
[li]One of the big changes in the past 5-10 years is SSD versus spinning hard disks- SSD is definitely better, but still more expensive.[/li]
[li]8 GB is the new saddle point for RAM (were it is the most cost effective purchase)[/li]
[li]Unless you make a special effort, you will be buying a Windows 10 computer, which isn’t as big a change from XP/Win7 as Windows 8 was, and is pretty friendly in setup and use (a bit too friendly sometimes)[/li][/ul]
There are a lot of alternatives out there now- tablets (if you don’t mind a small screen and don’t use the keyboard much), Chromebooks (great if you do most of your work online and don’t mind non-Windows), Laptops (can be carried around, but if you want a bigger screen and keyboard, can be connected to these and take up less desktop space than your current box), and every kind of “desktop” from tiny NUCs smaller than some laptops to big gamer towers that are almost works of art.
If it is close enough, I’m going to recommend a trip to the Dallas Micro Center. I bought my computer at the Tustin, CA Micro Center. They have a bigger and more varied selection than stores like Costco or Best Buy (even Fry’s) and you will get a real feel for what you could have sitting in your home. They have computers from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars, so they’ll have something that will fit any budget.
Because your current computer is eight years old, you don’t really have to answer the question “what do you have now?”. But you should have a good idea about your storage (hard disk or SSD requirements). If you aren’t sure how to estimate this, just right click on the drive in My Computer and select properties. That will tell you how much space you are using right now. If it’s under 100 GB, or a lot of it is movies, music, photos, etc., you might be able to buy a computer with a small SSD and add an external hard disk (for ~$60 for a TB). Every other spec on the system you buy will be a giant upgrade from what you have now, regardless of your price point.