In need of advice

[wildcat88]

So, I bring you my first world problems: I need a new computer. The one I have is ancient (in tech life) - somewhere close to 10 years old. Opening iTunes brings the CPU to 100% capacity. Ancient, I tell you

Comments

[leesa_perrie]

Hubby agrees that a tablet isn't what you need, a PC is much better for your needs (though if you can afford both, go for it! He loves his mini-iPad for reading, playing games and surfing the net).

This is his suggestion (a UK company, but I'm sure you could find this or something similar in the US):
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/hp-pavilion-p6-2371ea-desktop-pc-20042565-pdt.html

You need at least 1TB if you want it to last years, 2TB would be even better.

Intel® Core™ i5-2310 processor is good - we have the i3 version. If you do a lot of video editing and heavy photo editing then i5 is better, otherwise i3 is fine if that's all your budget runs to (i3 is more economical to run than i5, if that's a consideration). In fact, Intel processors are more economical than the AMD processors to run and tend to be more powerful - hubby highly recs the Intel if you can afford it. Especially as Intel, being more powerful, will be useful for longer than AMD. DO NOT get one with a Celeron processor!!! They're low powered and probably will last a couple years before you need to upgrade.

Memory (RAM) of 4GB would be perfectly fine, 8GB is possibly more than you need - but hey, more is never a bad idea if you can afford it and are intending to keep the PC for another 10 years (like we're hoping to)!

Basically, our PC that we bought just before Wins 8 came out (on purpose!) is similar to the machine I've linked to, but ours has an i3 processor, 6GB memory and 1TB hard drive. I can watch the HD vids I take with my camera just fine, can look at and edit my photos fine too, make digital artwork, watch online TV as well as the more normal Word, Access type activity too - and we use the integrated graphics for all of this. You might consider a graphics card for video editing and definitely if you were a gamer, but otherwise the integrated graphics should be all you need. We're very happy with it and it cost about £400 (sans monitor) at the time.

We also bought a 2TB external hard drive for back up purposes to make sure we don't lose anything, something you might want to consider too.