It’s easy to feel you’re falling behind or missing out when adverts and PC magazines are extolling the virtues of the latest processor and all it can do. But is the latest i5 or i7 quad-core Ivy Bridge processor with 8GB RAM what you really need?
The majority of jobs you’ll require your computer or laptop to do don’t demand up-to-the-minute equipment. If you regularly encode, decode or edit videos, render 3D designs or play the latest war games, then you’ll need the latest spec processor for these tasks.
A good question to ask yourself is this: do you only use your computer or laptop for emails, surfing the web, Word, Excel, YouTube and the occasional bit of picture editing? If so, then a decent quality five- to six-year-old machine is just as well equipped for these tasks as the latest i5 or i7 processors.
So you don’t always need a brand-new piece of kit when a refurbished 5-6 year old system can run the latest versions of Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and internet explorer with multiple tabs open and Photoshop at the same time, barely using more than 25% of your Central Processing Unit’s (CPU’s) power.
And gaming fans take note: six-year-old processors coupled with high-end graphics cards are perfectly capable of running modern warfare games.
So if the processor doesn’t make a difference to speed anymore, then what does? Find out in our next blog, when we’ll also look at what you should consider when buying a business desktop or laptop.
1 comment
Ian
Excellent explanation for a semi-illiterate grey-top such as myself: much needed for users outside the world of ‘need for speed’ gamers (Yes!!! we are out there). Listening to experts talking to experts can be one of the worst threats to our spoken/written language (and soooo mentally exhausting)…not everything can be sensibly reduced to catchy acronyms, which need to be translated before being understood, even by slick operators.
Ta!
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