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computer shopping list for mom

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Computer research for Mom

Search Method

Go to Amazon section Computers -> Desktops and then filter by 64gb and higher memory sorted by price lowest to highest. The computers that appear in this selection criteria are high end business workstations that are usually renewed and contain aging architectures.

Renewed Computers

Renewed means the computers have been purchased before, but were never used. Keep in mind these are business machines purchased in bulk and probably sat around collecting dust. This means vendors are forced to sell them at a discount like they are used, but they were likely never used by a person and seem new straight from manufacturing.

Aging Architecture

All of these computers feature DDR3 memory which is no longer manufactured, which means the computers must be sold at a substantial discount compared to competing newer computers. DDR4, the successor, became the industry standard in 2012 and became mainstream around 2015. Now you cannot even purchase a new computer with DDR3.

DDR4 versus DDR3 means the CPU can talk to the memory 25-100% faster. The practical result of that difference is that the overall speed of performing memory intense tasks only, which are things like: opening applications, opening files, and doing many things at once.

That performance gap will not be largely noticeable for years and is offset by amount of memory and robustness of CPU. In this case I am recommending computers with really powerful CPUs and 64gb of memory. The industry average for home computer memory now is scaling up from 8gb (cheap computer) to 16gb (more powerful computer). With 64gb of memory you will have more memory than you can possibly fill giving you a freedom to perform many tasks at once without needing to frequently restart your computer or having things slow down.

Selection Methodology

When looking at computers I try to find computers with a minimum of 64gb memory with minimum price against a combination of minimum baselines each of:

  • CPU
  • hard disk
  • video cards
  • operating system

CPU

There are three aspects to a CPU:

  • speed - CPU speed is the most important thing to consider. This speed determines how fast the brain of the computer can perform certain tasks.
  • cache size - Cache is the memory attached directly to the CPU. The CPU will store application instructions in here as short term memory before off-loading things to memory far away on the motherboard. The larger the cache size the less frequently the CPU needs to talk to the memory and the faster it can get things done. I don't mention this or dive into it.
  • number of cores - Modern CPUs feature multiple cores, which are like different logical CPUs sharing the same hardware. The more cores you have the more things you can do at once. This is important for servers that are constantly running multiple isolated instructions all the time. For your concern speed is much more important. Given two computers with CPUs of similar speeds more cores is better.

Hard Disk

There are two different kinds of hard drives. The traditional mechanical drives with rotating wheels are much cheaper which means more storage for a given price but are also much slower. The other kind, solid state drives, and purely electrical with no mechanical parts. That means hard drives that a several times faster and consume less electricity. I recommend solid state drives always. The performance is so noticeable that you shouldn't consider saving money on this. Imagine turning on the computer and booting into Windows in 25 seconds instead of 2 minutes.

Video Cards

This is really the wild card. The video card is the cheapest item to manually upgrade in these computers will result in the single greatest perception of performance. There are various different factors to video cards, but you only need to concern yourself with memory size and available ports.

  • video memory size - I use video memory size as a rough quick metric for video card quality. That statement isn't very accurate after you consider age of the video card's cpu (GPU) and memory speed, but it provides a means to discriminate cheap crap from better capability overall.
  • ports - The ports on the card determine what sort of video cables you can plug into it. There are 4 main port types: VGA, HDMI, DVI, and display port (DP). If your monitor doesn't support the ports on a given card you can probably find a cheap adaptor to convert from the cable type to the port type.
    • VGA - There are still a lot of VGA monitors out there as the VGA format dominated the computer industry for a very long time. This format is old and support on newer computers is almost completely gone. picture
    • DVI - DVI is the successor to VGA, but it is also on its way out because it doesn't support enough bandwidth for high resolution video. picture
    • HDMI - This is the current industry standard for high resolution video and is a competing standard to the newer DP standard. This is the most common interface for HD tv and many computer monitors. You need only the newest HDMI3 generation will support 4k resolution. picture
    • DP - This is a new format to meet the needs of high resolution digital video. It supports twice the bandwidth of HDMI2. Only 1 cable is needed for 4k resolution and two are needed for the emerging 8k resolution. This is the most common format supported by new video cards. picture

Operating system

Some of these computes come with Windows 10 Professional installed. Computer vendors pay much less to install Windows than what you would pay, because they have something called an OEM license, but it still costs money. No operating system is cheaper.

Computers with no operating system mean they have no software of any kind installed and you need to supply the operating system. This means you can use your own Windows license, if you already have one, or you can use a free operating system like Ubuntu. Ubuntu is great and comes with lots of free software that does probably everything you may ever need, but it is very different from Windows.

Some computers I have found

My recommendations: 64gb ram, 3ghz CPU, solid state hard disk, 1gb video card, Windows preinstalled. The cheapest computer is only $333 and it looks like a great computer, but I would need to upgrade the video card at about $150 and I would need to install an operating system, like Ubuntu.

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computer shopping list for mom