I am watching this thread as I also need to replace my desktop computer by next October. Nothing is wrong with it but there will be no further updates to Windows 10 beyond October 2025.
My computer is missing some bit of hardware that will not permit an update to Windows 11 so I am screwed.
It’s a Dell 2016 model and has been a flawless unit all these years. I had to replace a CPU fan about 4 years ago and that’s it.
I will likely just get a laptop until I move to a new place and then set up another desktop at that point.
You’d usually get that flame war from me but, I gotta say, the M4 Mac Mini is unusually a good bargain for an Apple product. For the use case the OP spelled out I think it’d probably do really well and is worth considering.
The downside is Apple works very hard to lock you into their ecosystem. Once in, it’s very hard to get out and Apple is rarely ever a bargain. This one seems it is though but they now have you locked in and the next upgrade is not likely to be a deal.
I kind of feel the same. Like the OP is exactly the use case some $499 Costco Lenovo PC is made for. Short of buying some hacky Chromebook or AliExpress/Temu mystery machine, it’s hard to imagine a modern new PC that can’t handle “web, Excel, email and organizing some photos”.
The 32GB will be the issue though. Most places just don’t make budget desktops with 32GB RAM and most PCs that do come with 32GB RAM are overspec’d for what the OP needs.
Any reason to not build your own?
I’ve switched over to ASRock mobo’s after ASUS’s “F our customers” policy came to light with no regrets. I don’t know if you need 32GB of memory yet and if not, I’d wait and upgrade when I needed it assuming the DDR5 RAM will be better a few years from now for relatively cheap.
ETA: Make sure you get a computer that supports DDR5.
Oh boy. I just replaced my 10 year old HP desktop with a new one from HP, and mom’s 10 year old HP laptop with a new one. You IT guys are making me nervous!
I’m also looking at a new desktop. I’m perfectly happy with the configuration of my current Lenovo, but the processor is old and not Windows 11 compatible. I’m wondering if I can get away with trying to find a new chip that fits in the old socket, or buying a new motherboard. Or is trying to upgrade the guts of an older machine just asking for trouble?
Probably not worth it. Especially if it’s an Intel machine, the motherboards are only good for two or three generations* which means you’re possibly already about capped and, even if not, any upgraded CPU would be incremental and likely still obsolete.
*As in, you can go from an 8th gen to a 9th gen on a board but 10/11th gen were another board type and 12/13/14 were another board type, etc
Sure, but I try not to make assumptions for other people unless they explicitly say they’re willing to handle it themselves. Also, RAM upgrades can get sticky with prebuilts. Dell is/was good for needing some pretty select RAM sticks in order to upgrade for example. Hell, I briefly had an Alienware that got pissy if you had the wrong unapproved case fans in it.
I should add there can be a caveat here. Sometimes the heatsink overhangs the RAM which means replacing the RAM means removing the heatsink. Certainly doable but now it is a lot more trouble.
Just don’t want someone cursing me in the future for saying it is easy (even if it usually is).
Me too. I am happy with both. At work we also had both, though Lenovo made it attractive to move away from Dell in the workplace so eventually it was all Lenovo. I also think both are solid choices and the prices tend to be good. I like that on their sites you can choose your components and they’ll ship to you pretty promptly.
Installation software complaining about a perfectly good computer not being “Windows-11 compatible”, that is sometimes? often? just bullshit that you can hack around, e.g.
So you are not screwed, and I would not discard a perfecty good computer only because of that.
Also, unless you really need Windows-only software you do not actually have to install Windows— just saying.
For a basic system like this (no fancy GPU / mobo / water cooling / lighting / other requirements), you’re very unlikely to beat the commodity pricing on commodity PCs. The big manufacturers pump them out every year and they lose value as soon as they hit store shelves, and are nearly worthless 2 years later.
It used to be that you can build a much better system, bang for buck, than off-the-shelf models, but I don’t think that’s been true for a decade or so now? Especially for a a basic home user system like the OP wants.
Yeah, I don’t think “save a lot” has really been true since the mid 2000s especially if you’re not waiting on sales for individual components and just want it now. The main reasons to build these days is control over parts selection, if you have used parts you can re-use (or want to buy used parts) and good ole hobbyist fun.
For a basic new system, whatever you do save will probably be offset by the time spent putting it together and there’s a lot to be said for “Bring it back to the store if it doesn’t work” versus troubleshooting a bunch of parts if it fails to boot.
The problem with pre-built systems from the likes of Dell or HP is they are almost always proprietary systems. You have very little ability to upgrade them or fiddle with them.
You get the box and that’s it.
Which may be fine for some people. My mom would never in a million years crack open a case to replace a component. She’d just toss the PC and get a new one.
FWIW my current PC was built in 2018 and it is still working great. I added RAM once. About time for a new video card (about time for a whole new one).
I would steer right away from Intel 12-14th gen CPUs. I’m am not at all confident their current slew of hardware problems is fixed by their latest microcode, nor that newer builds of them are completely fine.
You can usually upgrade the basics, no, like the SSD & RAM, at least? Maybe not the CPU & mobo, but those go obsolete so quickly and cost nearly as much as a new system anyway.
If you’re not building a powerful workstation / gaming computer, probably it’s not worth upgrading anything aside from storage anyway (especially if you’re starting with 16 or 32 GB of RAM already).
Some stupid Microsoft end-of-life forced upgrade is going to obsolete the system long before the hardware itself actually ceases to be enough.
Edit: And probably by the next major upgrade cycle, I bet much of the PC world will have moved to Arm too. I wonder if Intel will survive that long…
Do they need to? Usually the RAM brands will have configurators with this information already, e.g. Kingston and Crucial. I’ve never actually run into a compatibility issue before (of the few dozen systems I’ve upgraded), but admittedly most of that was long ago, when building systems still made sense. Have things have changed more recently…? Did they lock them down further?
Not going to matter if you’re just going to run standard Windows and do web/Excel/basic photo stuff. Poking around the UEFI for no good reason is just gonna make the system unstable or unbootable.
Anyway, all of this is just more reason to buy a pre-built system for the OP’s use case rather than fussing around with component compatibility. Not worth wasting time & effort thinking about that stuff for this use case.