Hi,
Five years ago I purchased my current machine, a refurbished AMD Athlon II X4 645 Processor 3.10ghz with 4GB RAM. I had lost touch with processor benchmarks, and when I hedged about the specs or the price or whatever, the Middle-Eastern salesman said, "But this is a quad, bro..." I've been happy with it, so I'm not in a hurry to replace.
Naturally, I want to be able to run a bunch of programs without any performance issues. I almost always use the same things:
Firefox (right now I have 15 tabs, which seems normal)
Chrome (just one tab as I use it stream movies)
iTunes
Utorrent
Two or three File Explorer windows (I often run searches)
Windows' default movie&tv player (I used to use VLC but it goes super-slow now)
At least three Open Office documents/slide shows
Webcam (used as a mirror to practice card sleights while watching movies on the second monitor).
Edge to read PDFs
I don't normally have all of these things open at once, but sometimes I do, and the thing can grind. I'll play a movie in HBONow, and it will stutter unless I close other applications. I typically restart once a week. With most of these things running right now, my CPU is claiming 40% utilization (though it bounces anywhere from 16% to 60%. My RAM usage is much more constant, in the low 80s.
I'm looking to spend under $250 and figured that since it's five years later, everything available should be better than what I have. Here's a $200 machine chosen almost at random on Fry's site: HP Compaq DC5800 Refurbished Desktop PC with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz E6550 4GB Desktop.
That just sounds pitifully weak, but would such a model be an improvement over my current system? Alternatively, would it make sense for me to just upgrade my RAM? Most of the sites I've browsed to answer these questions seem to say RAM is over-rated and won't help much with performance issues.
Five years ago I purchased my current machine, a refurbished AMD Athlon II X4 645 Processor 3.10ghz with 4GB RAM. I had lost touch with processor benchmarks, and when I hedged about the specs or the price or whatever, the Middle-Eastern salesman said, "But this is a quad, bro..." I've been happy with it, so I'm not in a hurry to replace.
Naturally, I want to be able to run a bunch of programs without any performance issues. I almost always use the same things:
Firefox (right now I have 15 tabs, which seems normal)
Chrome (just one tab as I use it stream movies)
iTunes
Utorrent
Two or three File Explorer windows (I often run searches)
Windows' default movie&tv player (I used to use VLC but it goes super-slow now)
At least three Open Office documents/slide shows
Webcam (used as a mirror to practice card sleights while watching movies on the second monitor).
Edge to read PDFs
I don't normally have all of these things open at once, but sometimes I do, and the thing can grind. I'll play a movie in HBONow, and it will stutter unless I close other applications. I typically restart once a week. With most of these things running right now, my CPU is claiming 40% utilization (though it bounces anywhere from 16% to 60%. My RAM usage is much more constant, in the low 80s.
I'm looking to spend under $250 and figured that since it's five years later, everything available should be better than what I have. Here's a $200 machine chosen almost at random on Fry's site: HP Compaq DC5800 Refurbished Desktop PC with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz E6550 4GB Desktop.
That just sounds pitifully weak, but would such a model be an improvement over my current system? Alternatively, would it make sense for me to just upgrade my RAM? Most of the sites I've browsed to answer these questions seem to say RAM is over-rated and won't help much with performance issues.
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2jyRKFA
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