Black Friday and Cyber Monday have passed, now the more rational \nChristmas season closeouts begin. As always, I have my own opinions on \nwhat represents a bargain. For a personal computer or laptop I \nrecommend a minimum of an intel i5 or AMD Ryzen 3 or A8 or better to \nsupport Windows 10 or Mac OS. I know there are a lot of machines out \nwith other processors that may look attractive; but, other designations \nfor processors are either a few years old or quite a bit less capable and thus a poor choice for a personal computer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n Historically, I have addressed some exceptions to the above processor \nguidance and I will repeat that here because there are some real nice \nmachines that aren’t in my above guidance. These machines are intended \nfor folks who do not need any processing power in their device; folks \nwho want to read email, daily news, maybe respond to an occasional \nletter and maybe view a spreadsheet. For this kind of application, \nwhere all the processing is done on the internet, the whole plethora of \nmachines opens up. Processors like the intel Atom, the N3 series or \neven the E series processors from AMD are designed for this kind of use \nand do very nicely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These “smaller” processors are intended for \nlow power consumption and the resulting devices can be quite small, \nlight and handy to carry. They start to have issues when folks try to \ndo graphics or photo editing, watch high resolution (4k) videos, or any \nsort of real-time map work. In addition, complicated or large documents\n and spreadsheets view fine but can be painful (slow responding) to edit\n on the smaller machines. On the other hand even a minimal battery may \nprovide 7-16 hours of use because they are such low power consuming \ndevices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whatever you are looking for, 6-month old designs abound\n in the marketplace and these are wonderful because they have some \nhistory and you can look at reviews and identify the units that have \nbeen successful (and the design failures, lemons, can also be \nidentified) and those are the units that will be closeout priced to make\n room for the new models recently announced.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Black Friday and Cyber Monday have passed, now the more rational Christmas season closeouts begin. As always, I have my own opinions on what represents a bargain. For a personal computer or laptop I recommend a minimum of an intel i5 or AMD Ryzen 3 or A8 or better to support Windows 10 or Mac … Continue reading “I missed Black Friday, did I miss the best deals?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23,24,25],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-laptop","tag-new-models","tag-personal-computer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":173,"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions\/173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}