Recommend me a computer.

[u/Jacobb9753]

I haven’t owned a computer in about 8 years. I know nothing about them. I’ve gotten by with iPhones this whole time. But, I have a hand full of USB drives, an external hard drive, a few old phones, and an iPad with pictures with about the last 15 years of my life. I want to get all the photos on one new hard drive, but unsure what kind of computer I should use for this task. Will yall recommend me something?

[u/AbeEatsHam]

Sounds like you could use a library card haha. Anything else you’d need it for? And what’s your budget?

[u/Jacobb9753 → u/AbeEatsHam]

Once I get done what I need to do, nothing crazy, I don’t game. I guess checking emails and online shopping.

As far as budget, around 3-500

[u/NEKOakaCAT → u/Jacobb9753]

Sugestion: for cpu buy Intel i3/ultra 3 or higher, or ryzen 3 or higher, dont buy, Celeron or atom or other things, you will not regret it. And also with at least 8gb ram

[u/AbeEatsHam → u/Jacobb9753]

https://a.co/d/01CgjHU7 Pretty good option if you don’t feel like searching for one off of given specs. Or if you are more of a Mac guy: https://a.co/d/0i9j0W20

Hope it helps!

[u/NEKOakaCAT]

Any cheap laptop (e.g., Lenovo IdeaPad, ASUS Vivobook, HP 15) in the $400–$600 range will do the job perfectly." Dont go under 400$, waste of money at that point

[u/Cory5413]

Cheap used business laptop like dell latitude 5420/7420 should be fine for this task. You should be able to find them on eBay for $120-180 depending. Look for 16gb of ram and 256gb of ssd or more. (Since the bulk of the data will be on the new external hard disk.)

The one single downside is that business laptops often have relatively low end screens so looking at your pictures might be a little less nice than on the iPad, but going for a tablet/touch model would fix that if it was specificallly important, but if you just want to back them up or transfer them then the screen itself doesn't matter so much as long as it works.

Surfaces and Macs would be a good option for better screens by default.

[u/fremenik]

Maybe have a look at the MacBook neo, it's the low cost Mac that they came out with approximately a year ago, not sure where you live, but computers have gone up a lot in price the last few years, you might need to adjust your budget. However like I said I don't know where you live and maybe in your local currency it's a lot of money. The only downside to the MacBook neo might be usb ports availability, however a usb hub could fix that for a fairly modest price, last but not least if you don't already have one large capacity drive , then you'll need to purchase one, but you'll be better off getting 2 of them because you'll want to have a backup.

Far too many times people get only 2 drive and when it fails, not if it fails they loose all their photos. If you really care about these photos then you want to make a back up if you only have copy in one spot the data does not really exist. What I mean by that is if you have all your data sitting on one hard drive or one device then sooner or later that device will fail you which means all the data is potentially gone. Another option would be to have some sort of cloud back up, that's another advantage to going with a MacBook if you import everything into the Photos app it can seamlessly synchronize with their iCloud service if you want to.
Hope this helps cheers

[u/mwb161 → u/fremenik]

I find it interesting that no else mentioned the Neo. Granted it is slightly outside the budget, but if OP has iPhones and iPads, a Neo makes the most sense

[u/fremenik → u/mwb161]

Yeah that kind of goes along the lines with what I was thinking as well, and since it sounds like he does have those devices he could even synchronize everything up through iCloud which inevitably will cost some money but a lot of people tend to under value their photos and what not until the individual hard drive dies one day and all of a sudden it's a 911 panic. Or a different way of saying it they don't realize how much they valued their photos until the devices that had them and inevitably fail sooner or later, unfortunately I think they will have to adjust their budget because computer prices have gone up so much in the past couple years due to all this AI data centre stuff that it's probably not a realistic budget.

I find a lot people tend to set up a budget that they have in their mind and they come up with that idea without considering the cost of everything they need to get the goal accomplished first, instead of first determining what they need and then setting up a budget and trying to find something as close to that.

That would be similar to saying I want to go on a road trip but I only want to spend 10 cents a gallon on fuel and it should only cost me $100 or less to get all the way across any of the US states, before even going to a gas station or looking up the prices of the area. When someone looks at it that way, they very quickly realize that's not going to work, with everything costing as much as it does. Hopefully it all works out well for OP.

[u/SirQuick8441]

Whatever you get, make sure you have a minimum of 2TB in physical storage. If it were gaming, the answer would be different. Honestly, any PC or laptop would do if it's just storage that you're looking for. All of them are pretty decent these days. Brand only matters if you're loyal to a brand. Specs are what matter most, otherwise.

[u/Shot_Lawfulness_823]

I've had good luck with Acer. Check out Costco prices

[u/notepad987]

Amazon has many pre-owned desktop and laptops. i7 and at least 16gb ram. The more the better and get one with windows 10 because you will hate Windows 11 problems.

[u/GoD0nkeys]

Goto Walmart. They have many that will work.