New computer advice

[wilbers]

The early 2000s knocked and wants its external drive and data partition back.

An external drive is prudent for taking backups, but using one for your main data is really not necessary. Windows 10 and 11 are pretty robust, and a novice user is not going to need to do a reinstall. I have not done one for ages.

2022 knocked and seems external drives are making a slight comeback as the connection on recent versions of USB has got fast enough to use them nearly as well as an internal one - that said, its still a niche market as its only a benefit for those swapping between 2 or more machines on a regular basis.

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[Cloud Strife]

No need for those archaic spinny disks either.

I still use a couple in my desktop. The first one is used for games where read/write speeds are of little importance, the second one is for things like photos that don't need to be kept on an SSD.

 

[wilbers]

Easier to get a 1TB SSD for the boot drive now, rather than a 500GB one - not a lot of difference in price between the budget versions. if you eventually need more than that in a few years then you can add a second drive rather than the more awkward clone and replace option (I've had to do that once, my first SSD was one of the fairly early ones and only had 64GB capacity).

 

[py_megapixel]

Now we know the requirements I would go with an Intel i5.

Or the AMD equivalent (Ryzen 5). There's virtually no reason to prefer Intel over AMD or vice-versa. They are both building good quality CPUs which are equivalent in functionality, and one is often slightly cheaper than the other.

 

[JamesT]

Or the AMD equivalent (Ryzen 5). There's virtually no reason to prefer Intel over AMD or vice-versa. They are both building good quality CPUs which are equivalent in functionality, and one is often slightly cheaper than the other.

The only thing I’d say about that is that AMD in the last couple of years haven’t been able to supply at quantity and have been focusing on the higher end models. If you’re looking for the cheaper models, especially with graphics onboard then Intel are much more likely.

 

[py_megapixel]

The only thing I’d say about that is that AMD in the last couple of years haven’t been able to supply at quantity and have been focusing on the higher end models. If you’re looking for the cheaper models, especially with graphics onboard then Intel are much more likely.

Yes, that's a reasonable point.

 

[Ediswan]

Also, some SSD interfaces are faster than others. Specifically, NVMe/PCIe is significantly faster than SATA.

I know that when HP shifted their bog-standard business laptops from SATA connected SSD to NVMe/PCIe connected (with everything else much the same), Windows boot time reduced dramatically. Starting the likes of Word and Excel became too fast to be worth timing.

 

[birchesgreen]

Well even MP3s, i buy my music from Bandcamp and download the MP3s. Maybe i am just neat and tidy.

 

[najaB]

Personally I find 1TB a sweet spot at the moment, though it can be a bit expensive on laptops, if you're doing a "to spec" desktop then it should be easily affordable.

Is it really that expensive? I can see 1TB M.2 NVMe SSDs for around £70 on Amazon just now. The Crucial one is £65 as a Black Friday deal. That's only about £15 more than an HDD.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Is it really that expensive? I can see 1TB M.2 NVMe SSDs for around £70 on Amazon just now. The Crucial one is £65 as a Black Friday deal. That's only about £15 more than an HDD.

Laptop vendors are pricing 1TB up quite a lot. Yes, you can often though not always swap it (some these days are soldered on instead of using legacy hard drive interfaces) but you need the skills to do that and it will often void warranty if you need to take it to bits to do it rather than it being one with user access to the drive designed in.

 

[dgl]

When I brought my current laptop having a 1tb ssd was in a lot of ways a deal-breaker and there aren't a huge of them out there really, not many manufacturers could offer one and a combination of that and battery capacity made my mind up in the end.
Ended up paying £1,098 for mine last October, ending up getting a MSI Summit Flip 13 evo, it's essentially what was called an ultrabook with an i7 1185, iris Xe graphics, 16gb RAM (soldered) and a 1tb Phison SSD, screen is a 1920 X 1200 13.1" with a 16:10 ratio. With a laptop cooler it runs ETS2 @ 1080p on max settings fine

 

[Puffing Devil]

I've recently built my next 10-year PC, which I use for general browsing, MS Office, 4 * CCTV Cameras (Blue Iris) running 24/7 and a little light Photoshop.

Spec: i5 Processor, 2Tb M2 SSD, 4Tb HDD (SSD Backup, CCTV rolling Archive, Photo Library), 2* 16Gb Memory Sticks. Cost about £600 with case, PSU and W11.

For the small incremental costs in the SSD and Memory, it's a no-brainer for a machine with a projected life of 10 years and will probably start to limp along like my old AMD machines built 10 years ago.

 

[Crossover]

Some great advice here. One thing I would reiterate from what has been said, I would advise not using anything other than SSD as a boot device (and for having the main applications installed on) - use "spinning rust" for the purpose and no matter how expensive the CPU, GPU or the amount of RAM you throw at it, a spinning disk will be a major bottleneck and slow the machine right down

Laptop vendors are pricing 1TB up quite a lot. Yes, you can often though not always swap it (some these days are soldered on instead of using legacy hard drive interfaces) but you need the skills to do that and it will often void warranty if you need to take it to bits to do it rather than it being one with user access to the drive designed in.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the soldered ones are eMMC - I have come across a few in the past when helping my colleagues with personal devices, and I would personally never entertain purchasing a machine with one

 

[Bletchleyite]

Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the soldered ones are eMMC - I have come across a few in the past when helping my colleagues with personal devices, and I would personally never entertain purchasing a machine with one

I think you're right. It's fine to purchase them, but make sure you go for a size large enough to do you 10 years or so. Similarly if RAM is not upgradeable don't go for less than 16GB and you may want to go for more.

Generally slimmer form metal bodied laptops and all-in-ones are less likely to be upgradeable, and classic big chunky plastic ones and desktops more likely to be easily upgradeable, often having separate compartments underneath to gain easy access to RAM and disk. It's all horses for courses, really. Big chunky laptops are generally cheaper, but if you're going to be carrying it around all day you may prioritise a lighter, slimmer device over easy upgradability.

 

[JamesT]

Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the soldered ones are eMMC - I have come across a few in the past when helping my colleagues with personal devices, and I would personally never entertain purchasing a machine with one

The really cheap stuff is eMMC, but high-end ultra thin laptops like Dell XPS 2in1 and Apple will be something like NVMe for speed.

 

[contrex]

Yes get as much RAM as you can afford, you won't regret it.

I bought a Lenovo m70s desktop (very nicely made) in March, i5 10500, 16 GB RAM, to replace a 7 years old system, which also had 16 GB. The new system had one 16 GB RAM stick. The supplier said they would not upgrade the RAM, but would sell me another identical stick, to fit myself, for £42. I went for it, and it has 32 GB. I suppose I didn't desperately need that amount, but I like to play around with VMWare virtual machines, and it's nice to give them plenty of RAM. I partly went for it because each PC I have had since the early 2000s has had twice the RAM of the previous one, and I didn't like to break the chain. I still have 2 RAM slots free in case I want to go higher.