Thread: Computer/program help

Ive been reading more and more about building my own
It seems that since im not wanting a gaming computer buying pre-builts are a better option. Beside having a warranty it can be made by big companies cheeper that me buying parts. At least this is what Im finding out. I want a basic computer but with extra storage so now i just have to get more info on prebuilds like extra slots to add extra componants.

Building your own is for geeks and folks who really know computers. More and more with new computers things are going onto a cloud for backup and storage plus the solid state drives that come with most computers will hold everything you would ever need unless you store gigabytes and gigabytes of data and then you can buy an external drive of huge size dirt cheap.

The Genie timeline was a bust for me. I've tried to down load it three times now and it comes up as "File". Then trying to open it it wants me to find a program to open it. No installer or exe file in this file. So its beyond my ability to open and install.

Originally Posted by Gasman

The Genie timeline was a bust for me. I've tried to down load it three times now and it comes up as "File". Then trying to open it it wants me to find a program to open it. No installer or exe file in this file. So its beyond my ability to open and install.

Ill send you a link to a different one tomorrow Jerry

Thanks Steve.

And thanks to everyone who has commented. This is another large learning curve for me. I was stubborn and said I didn't need to have a computer for a long time (2015). Now I wish I had started much sooner. My phone is still a mystery to me at times. At work the other day our Safety Man wanted me to forward an email I got on my phone to him. He asked "Can you forward that to me". I told him "No,but here is my phone and if you want to make it do the forwarding go for it". I didn't have a clue how to do it. Now I think I might be able to do it. Maybe!

Steve hooked me up with a couple options. He has also answered a bunch of questions for me. Thanks for your time, Steve.

Originally Posted by Gasman

Steve hooked me up with a couple options. He has also answered a bunch of questions for me. Thanks for your time, Steve.

Anytime Jerry, I'll try to help as much as i can.

Originally Posted by Gasman

Ive been reading more and more about building my own
It seems that since im not wanting a gaming computer buying pre-builts are a better option. Beside having a warranty it can be made by big companies cheeper that me buying parts. At least this is what Im finding out. I want a basic computer but with extra storage so now i just have to get more info on prebuilds like extra slots to add extra componants.

Unless you have really specific reasons for wanting to build your own, there is quite literally no objective reason anymore to do so. For regular use, the right off the shelf computer is going to be cheaper than anything you can build yourself because HP, Lenovo etc get their hardware much cheaper than you. The only reasons left are a) gaming performance or b) machine learning or extremely performance dependent computing.

I write a lot of computer software, build programs that utilize every CPU core in my system, and even when I need it to crunch a massive amount of data, my off-the-shelf machine has no problem with it.

The only advice I would add in this regard is make sure that it has the ability to add memory later because adding memory is pretty much the only upgrade most people will ever do and which make a huge difference.

Thanks for your comment Bruno. After a bit of googling i see memory is different from storage. Storage being the hdd or ssb space. And memory is the space the chip has, like the 32gb ram im looking into. Ram being memory.

Please correct me if im wrong. And what size ram do you or others feel is best or a minimum?

That is indeed correct. Sorrage (HDD or SSD) is how much permanent storage you have for pictures, documents, programs, .....
Memory is what the computer uses when it's working on something. If you open a picture for example, the contents are loaded in memory where the CPU can perform operations on it.

How much memory you need depends on what sort of things you generally do with your computer.
It pays to keep in mind that your computer is also doing a gazillion things in the background. Behind the scenes, memory is allocated (reserved is a way to think about it), used, resized, de-allocated again etc. Having a lot of free memory helps a lot because the memory manager doesn't have to do much effort to find free blocks whenever some program or the operating itself needs a block. You can think of your compute rmemory as a big parking lot for 1000 cars. Logically, you can fit 1000 cars. But if there are only 500 cars, finding a spot is easy and if occasionally, someone needs to park a semi or a winnebago, the parking lot manager doesn't need to reshuffle the cars to make that possible. So even if you only ever need to park 500 cars and the occasional semi, having space for 1000 cars means there is never a hassle.

So to take that back to the discussion at hand, I would say 8 GB is the very minimum. But I advise 16 GB because if you are a regular, casual computer user, 16 GB is more than enough to never experience issues. And I would make sure there are free slots for adding memory at a later stage in case you ever need to for some reason. I would make sure of this because adding memory is the single best upgrade you can do if you run into performance issues, in terms of bang for the buck.

That said, if you choose a computer now and going from 16 to 32 now for only 50$ in case of special deals or whatever, I would do that and be done with it because it means your computer has enough resources to outlive you.