Best computer deals?

A little more detail, Gina: when you say "handling lots of heavy photos", what do you mean? Do you do a lot of photo editing? Or just keep a lot of photos on the computer?

 

Am I understanding you correctly that you've been editing photos on an e-machine computer made in 1998?

Anyway, in your new computer you're going to want a lot of RAM memory, at least 8 MB for photo editing and a large hard drive for storing photos, a 1 TB should do you. I'd also buy a 16 GB USB stick and use it as back up storage for your important photos and docs.

With that said, if you are processing photos for websites, they are typically low resolution, likely 72 dpi, and you may not need that much RAM, but you might as well get it.

 

Would agree with 8 meg of memory and big hard drive though you can add storage with a usb hard drive as well. Wife and I both have external for books, music and pictures. There are also network drives if you have a home network though setting them up can take a bit of time.

As to brand, at this time I would highly recommend avoiding Lenovo, they have absolutely no service. People are promised call backs that never come, high prices for replacement disks, just terrible service. The techs know little more than hello and we will call you. The units are great as long as you don't have to deal with service. I've had two and they have been real work horses, on one now actually.

We have Acer, Toshiba, HP, Asus and have no problems. Hp desktops have been very good to us but the other two in laptops have also been great.

Be sure to get units that have windows 8.1 on them as the update from 8 to 8.1 is long and a pain (700+ meg download). There are a lot of win 7 units available as well if you do not care for 8 and above.

An aside: Did you get the recall notice from emachines? They had a large number of machines with defective floppy drives that they knew were defective and sold them anyway. If you were first owner and registered them, then if they were involved you would have been notified.

I had wondered for several years how so many typos had been missed in my editing - when I got the cards I knew - the floppy drives were supposed to compare saved info with the original and correct errors but did not. We had three of them.

All in one computers are very nice, with touch screen might assist you in your work. They have the draw back of if monitor goes out you have to repair or get new computer and monitor.

Go to Best buy or other retailer and just snoop and play awhile and see what might work best for you. After you know what you might want go looking for best price - Amazon, tigerdirect etc.

 

As long as you keep yours look for windows 8.1. It is a bit different but is a good system and will be around longer.

Any computer will come with unwanted stuff but you can remove it or ignore it.

I seldom use my touch screen on the desktop, but it would be nice for photo work I'd guess.

Bummer about the memory problem. My wife had a stroke couple years ago - she doesn't think the way she used to - frustration! She struggles to think through processes.

 

I went to BestBuy last week and saw some remarkable computers that far surpass what I use now for a very reasonable price ($250 to 375 range).

Touch screen, Windows 8, quad-core with enough memory to last you forever.

Caveat: I spoke with a tech guy that passed through our lab a few days later and he encouraged me to wait for Windows 9 - he related Windows 8 to Windows Millennium and Vista.

If this computer lives for another 2 years or more, then I'll get upgrade to a low cost Windows 9 version.

Rob

 

This is the machine you seek.