Considering buying an all in one computer for general home duties to replace an old ageing laptop which is largely redundant due to Ipads. Use would be general office use plus the ability to run a radio control simulator programme (Realflight) and some basic photo editing. I don't tend to use the cloud much, preferring hard drives for storage as I use a NAS drive for music duties and photo storage. a DVD drive drive would be a plus but I know I could add an external drive if necessary. So, what spec should I look for in terms of HDD, RAM and processor speed. I was thinking 1Tb hdd, 8Gb RAM and a minimum of i5 processor, any thoughts or is that a bit overkill for our needs.
Strongly recommend an SSD rather than a spinning disk, if that's what you mean by 'hdd'. Aim for 240GB ideally.
For general usage of the computer it makes a lot more difference than the processor or RAM.
There's usually loads of refurbished business desktops on eBay which will suit.
It's kind of hard to keep track of the relative performance of the various i3 and i5 models year to year but an i5 should be plenty fast enough for you even if it's a few years old. And as above, get an SSD.
240Gb ssd, is that big enough?, I always seem to be deleting stuff on a small capacity drive to free up space.
If you're going refurbished route, take a look at europc for dell stuff.
Have had a few things from them and they've been excellent.
SSDs seem to be plummeting in price presently, a Samsung 1TB SSD is £110 on Amazon, "no name" Chinese ones are £80.
I agree that it'll make a far bigger difference day to do than a marginally better processor or RAM.
reluctantwrinkly
Member
240Gb ssd, is that big enough?, I always seem to be deleting stuff on a small capacity drive to free up space.
You said you had a NAS so I presumed you would keep all the space hogging stuff on there?
If you need local disk space, then either do as the poster suggests and buy an aftermarket 1TB ssd or whatever, or you could buy something like the HP Pavillion below, which comes with an SSD for the OS and programs, and a 1TB HD to store stuff on.
Look for HP Pavilion 24-xa0006na Full-HD All-in-One
https://store.hp.com/UKStore/Merch/Offer.aspx?p=c-hp-pavilion-aio