Computer woes... the usual for me.

Cody

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Gastown
And the baller option #3 just for Cody. This is the only acceptable option for luxury vehicle owners.

Super baller. That thing would browse the shit out of some internet. As long as you don't ask it to work with any other computers, networks, peripherals, or expect common software programs like Quickbooks to work with it, you'd be sitting pretty. All you would need is a clip on man bun, a poorly made but trendy double IPA, and a v-neck deeper than Jungian analytical psychology and you'd be the envy of every college student in the country.
 

nnnnnate

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Supporting Member
Location
WVC, UT
All you would need is a clip on man bun, a poorly made but trendy double IPA, and a v-neck deeper than Jungian analytical psychology and you'd be the envy of every college student in the country.

Seriously though, didn't you just describe a chunk of your clientele? How many fixies do you get walked into your store each day? lol

Full disclosure I'm typing on a 2008 iMac right now that I bought for my wife for Christmas that year. I have a work provided mac book pro laptop and my main computers in my cubicle at work are two mac minis, a mac pro, (all running windows 7) and the newest is a Dell T7600. My servers are all Dells and run either Server 2012 R2 or Windows 7. I really like Mac hardware and the joke at our office is that Mac hardware runs windows better than anything else. I've been tinkering with Win10 though lately and REALLY like it a lot. I'm lucky in that I have a lot of hardware that runs a lot of different software and I haven't bought really any of it since 2008 and this iMac which is running like a dog on 2GB ram (buts its controlling my 3D printer so I can't complain too much...)
 

cruiseroutfit

Cruizah!
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Vendor
Location
Sandy, Ut
Adding a graphics card is just a little harder than swapping out RAM sticks. Totally doable, even for you Kurt.

Don't overestimate me :D

Just took a peak at the monitor on amazon and if the pictures are correct they have HDMI, DVI, VGA, and DisplayPort inputs so based on the couple towers I looked at on BestBuy you may not even need to add a video card. (the BB boxes had HDMI and VGA outputs.) Your lady did good. Had she thought you weren't particularly good last year and bought some squard 19" dells I might have suggested returning them for a single 27" but two 24"s will be good assuming you have the desk space for it. (And if my memory serves you might have to clean up that desk just a little...lol)

Right on, I'll keep her around. PS, my office computer is just fine and pretty new. This will be in my home office with plenty of desk space (don't say a word rholbrook :D), part of having a new computer will be getting rid of several old ones.

Costco Option 1 8GB RAM, 1 TB Hard Drive, Intel i5 CPU, Win10
Costco Option 2 16GB RAM, 2 TB Hard Drive, Intel i7 CPU, Win10

i5 vs i7 is like the difference between v6 and v8. Obviously a v8 a better but for some people a v6 will work.
Ram is your 0-60mph time. 8GB is like your standard run of the mill soccer mom car. 16GB is the car that puts a smile on your face when you push the skinny pedal.
You already know whats going on with hard drives. Depending on how old the ones are in the box that is getting retired you might could throw them into this new box. It would probably be better to go new but it really just depends on if you want to spend the money on it.

The biggest thing about deciding whether to spend the extra $100 on a computer is thinking about how long you realistically want it to be useful. If you expect to go as long as possible spend the extra money now and when it starts to slow down it won't be as noticeable since it was faster to begin with.

Sweet, I can totally stomach that #2 option. Looks solid. Unless my planned uses makes you think otherwise, I'll Costco up on that.

Did you say what the purpose of this machine was? Is this going to be for work or just a place for you to look at all the new places you've been at night after everyone has gone home for the night?

See above. I'll use it for internet, picture browsing, perhaps website work and I'd really like to buckle down on my AFC stuff and having everything on a single computer is huge for that.
 

cruiseroutfit

Cruizah!
Moderator
Vendor
Location
Sandy, Ut
I'll admit, I'm rocking iPads and for travel they rock. Super tidy and killer battery life. I use them for pretty much internet/FB only but they have been nice.
 

Cody

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Gastown
Cody said:
All you would need is a clip on man bun, a poorly made but trendy double IPA, and a v-neck deeper than Jungian analytical psychology and you'd be the envy of every college student in the country.

Seriously though, didn't you just describe a chunk of your clientele? How many fixies do you get walked into your store each day? lol

Ha ha, surprisingly not really. My biz is for people that like beer, are interested in the intricacies of it, and want to be able to make it themselves. Most hipsters are more interested in being seen as a beer snob because they think craft is cool, and don't actually take the time to learn anything about the stuff.

I'll see my way out of this thread now :cody:
 

nnnnnate

Well-Known Member
Supporting Member
Location
WVC, UT
I gave those two Costco options just as examples and I'm sure you could walk into bestbuy and get something very similar for about the same price. You could probably find those on amazon as well if you looked.

Kurt, realistically how much space for photos do you need? I think I've mentioned this before but I'll say it again. Having cloud storage for photos and other docs is a pretty awesome thing. When you transfer them over to your computer from a real camera when you get home from a trip the auto sync to the cloud. You can set your phone to sync after taking pictures. You don't have to try and remember what sets of pics you've already copied to a second drive or keep track of all the spare drives floating around your house.

I know some are concerned with google (or microsoft or dropbox or ...) going through them and losing your privacy that way but at least for me its not something I'm worried about. It really makes backing things up a breeze. The other benefit is that you are able to access them anywhere you can get an internet connection by logging in to the website so you would be able to reference docs or pics away from your office computer.

I personally use google drive but in the past used dropbox which I liked just fine. I had gotten a promo with a cell phone I bought and had 20GB free for a couple years. When that promo ran out I looked around and went with gdrive. With Drive you get 15GB free and if you want/need more you can pay monthly for it. I just checked and am using 38GB with a 100GB plan and I pay $2 a month for it. Automatic backups and anywhere access is totally worth $24 a year to me. Here is the price break downs for drive.


 

Herzog

somewhat damaged
Admin
Location
Wydaho
Ha ha, surprisingly not really. My biz is for people that like beer, are interested in the intricacies of it, and want to be able to make it themselves. Most hipsters are more interested in being seen as a beer snob because they think craft is cool, and don't actually take the time to learn anything about the stuff.

I'll see my way out of this thread now :cody:


Damn I missed you. :D
 

ozzy702

Well-Known Member
Location
Sandy, UT
I've built a solid 50+ machines over the years for people and my 9-5 job is in I.T.. I see people spend money in the wrong areas a lot of the time and cheap out in areas that could really make the machine much faster. The biggest areas that most users can see a massive increase in seat of your pants "speed" and responsiveness are in 1) Having sufficient RAM (memory) for their needs and 2) Using an SSD drive as their OS and programs drive. Both are fairly cheap and cost effective upgrades to even older desktops.

Something along the following lines will give you a really nice user experience and be solid and reliable for a LONG time. I've pasted links to the parts below. This is normal pricing but you can often find deals that could knock as much as $75 off the total ($735 for a single drive, another $150 for redundancy).

i5, SSD, nice case, 16gb of ram, nice quality psu, 4TB of storage with a quality drive(s) and a setup that for the average user should last decade. The IGP in Haswell and newer CPUs is actually decent. It'll run dual monitors no problem and work great for everything but gaming. My wife's desktop uses basically the same setup except an i3, it's a great little box and idle only pulls 34 watts from the wall.

The HD may eventually need to be replaced depending on usage but I see no reason why it wouldn't be a great machine for 10 years. Computing power has been stagnant for the past five years with very little increase with each release. Mainly it's just lower power consumption under load that has improved a bit year after year.

Hardware has just far outpaced software and short of gaming and VR, your average user has pretty basic needs from a computing standpoint. Where you'll feel a big increase in speed over crappy box store machines is in having an SSD. Another nice thing about building your own machine is you have quality parts that last a long time.

Take it from someone who has literally worked with thousands of enterprise HP desktops (which are nicer than box store stuff)... the hardware sucks. The motherboards suck. The power supplies suck (and are proprietary now). The ram is always slow and you have no options to increase speeds or tighten timings. The hard drives are always the cheapest model possible.

The offsite backup of your important data is nice and fairly affordable as long as you aren't backing up really large quantities. I have everything valuable to me backed up twice, once in a nas at my house (that's accessible anywhere I go) and once off site on a box of mine at work. I have way too much data to pay for someone to store in the cloud.


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116991

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157512&ignorebbr=1

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231528&ignorebbr=1

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371033&ignorebbr=1

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811352011

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA2W02CZ2241

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145912&ignorebbr=1
 
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