Picking the Right Computer for Your Marketing with Guest Jamie Cote

March 17, 2023

Are you in the market for a new computer? Then this episode is for you. We sit down with Jamie Cote from Personalized Computers in Columbia, MO and ask all the questions you need answers to when searching for the perfect computer. 

Transcription

Jamie Cote  

i3, i5, i7, and i9, you’ve probably seen these as you look for computers. I asked my Intel rep when that first started like, does that correspond to something technical? Is there something in the design architecturally? Is it? No, it’s just marketing, we just stack the numbers. So as the number goes up, the processing power increases. So that makes it easier for us to think about.

Monica Pitts  

If you’re a natural born marketer, You’re one lucky son of a gun. If you’re like most people, marketing, especially online marketing is about as appealing as standing in a police lineup. The MayeCreate team of creatives has transformed websites and digital marketing from craptastic to fantastic since 2005. Our podcast Marketing with Purpose makes sense of marketing, so you can make purposeful decisions instead of carrying on with the same old crap you’ve been doing. And now your host, Monica Pitts, founder of MayeCreate with another episode on how to make your marketing not suck. Hello, again, and welcome back to Marketing with Purpose. My name is Monica Pitts. And today I have an awesome guest with me, I have Jamie Cote with Personalized Computers. So I invited Jamie on the podcast today because I got an email from one of our listeners. And she was getting ready to buy a new computer to start her blog and to build her website. And she wanted me to like tell her what type of computer to buy. And I thought I am so unqualified for this, right. But I do have somebody who’s really qualified, who builds my computers for me, and I thought he’d be the perfect guest to bring here and educate all of us all about computers. So, Jamie, why don’t you start by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your business?

Jamie Cote  

Great. Yeah, thank you, Monica. As you say Jamie Cote, Personalized Computers, we we opened our doors in downtown Columbia 25 years ago, in 1998. We started as a computer manufacturer or retail repair operation. And since that time, have really transitioned mostly away from the retail and consumer side of business. And we’re more of a managed services provider, and focus more on the business to business relationships. That being said, we still have doors open to the public, we have still a pretty good core of the word I’m looking for, I guess would be it’s eluding me right now. But people who know will come to me in a second, but it’s okay that just a good quarter of people who have just been coming to us for years and years. And and so they continue to seek us out and find us even for walk in repairs, LCD screen repairs, virus removal, those types of things. But you know, the questions, the things that we’re going to delve into today, Monica, our general questions that our business clients ask is, well, what’s the right tool for what I’m looking to do, whether it’s a laptop, or a desktop, and then the specifications? Additionally, I feel these questions from friends, a lot of times to and family members, like, hey, I’m all on Amazon, what am I looking for? And so pretty commonly, I’ll just give them the list of things that I would prioritize. But, you know, there’s no one, one solution for everyone, because everyone has different needs, depending on what they’re doing with their technology tool, right?

Monica Pitts  

Yeah, I know that we have multiple levels of computers, from laptops to tablets to really, really robust gaming computers that we use for stuff like video editing, to simpler desktop, things in our office. And that’s just our office. So I can only imagine how many more options there are out there for people to choose from. Which is probably why it can feel so overwhelming if you are not educated like yourself about the different parts of the computer and what they do. So what if we start there? Because, like, when I look at a computer listing, I don’t know what the different parts of a computer are. To be quite frank, like, I don’t know the difference between the RAM and the SSD or any of that stuff. So can you tell me so what what, what the heck is that? Like, what’s RAM? What does that mean?

Jamie Cote  

Well, let’s let’s go through all the parts and I’ll give you a really brief explanation of each right I’ve already started the CPU, okay, the central processing unit, the two dominant manufacturers, there are a few others that make chips, but overwhelmingly you’re going to see computers that either have an Intel processor or an AMD processor. We have standardized for business purposes on the Intel platform, being a little more familiar with the business applications for compiler that compatibility rely ability and all those things. So I will, I’ll probably focus more on the Intel side of that, because that’s what we recommend. AMD is a great product that great for gaming enthusiasts and, and others that are looking for performance. But I, I usually tend to focus on the Intel side of the CPU world, the CPU is central processing unit. So CPU is a TLA, we have a lot of TLA’s in our industry to TLA, if you didn’t know is a three letter acronym for three letter acronym. And we have, we have a lot of those. When I first heard that, I thought that was pretty entertaining. And they have a three letter acronym for three letter acronyms. So CPU being one of those TLAs stands for a central processing unit. It’s it’s kind of the brains of the whole computer, right? It’s, we’ve seen this transition starting really about 10 years ago, if my memory serves correctly, maybe even before that from a CPU that had a high clock speed, right, so the first thing that changed was clock speed, the ability for that processor processor to process data and information faster. Okay, so you can see clock speeds, going from 150 megahertz up to, you know, 300 to 350 to 400. And then we had gigahertz and then things went crazy from there. And then then what we saw is, CPUs at at that time, technology had kind of maxed out on how fast a processor could process information without overheating, you know, became an issue of heat and power and all those things. And so what manufacturers did at that point, and this is irrelevant, I’m getting into history. But to help understand what what they started doing is parallel computing. So instead of a single processor, that start making processors with multiple cores, right, each core with the ability to process information independently on a computer. So if you have a computer that has two cores, or four cores, it’s going to be great at, you know, handling basic business applications. One of them one of the cores may be active to run, like your anti virus software, right, it’s processing what’s going on there in the background. But different cores can handle different things. Additionally, I’m gonna get a little nerdy here. But some processors, in addition to having multiple cores can be multi-threaded. That’s a technology years ago that Intel came up with called hyper threading. And that’s the ability for a core to handle more than one thread of information at a time. So simultaneously. So what you started to see is, instead of CPUs that were clocked really fast, you’d see a CPU with multiple cores at a lower clock speed. But that could handle a lot more traffic at once. Thus, eliminating bottlenecks on bandwidth, right, it could just do more with with what it had even at slower clock speeds. So that transition started probably 10 to 15 years ago, in that in that range, we started seeing multi core processors, now you can see a processor on the market that has like 16 cores, like 10 to 16 cores. And that’s, that’s pretty powerful. That to do a lot of things, right. Yeah. So So that’s multi core, clock speed still plays into it. But being less nerdy, right? Like if I’m talking to somebody who doesn’t want to understand how a processor works, if we’ll just stick with each component, right. The recommendations that I usually make Intel’s made the naming pretty easy from a marketing standpoint, they started over a decade ago with the core line of processors, i3, i5, i7 and i9. You’ve probably seen these as you looked for computers,

Monica Pitts  

I was just going to ask you what do those numbers even mean? Like because I don’t get it?

Jamie Cote  

I asked my Intel rep when that first started, like, does that correspond to something technical? Is there something in the design architecturally? Is it? No, it’s just marketing, we just, we just kind of stack the numbers. So as the number goes up, the processing power increases. So that makes it easier for us to think about right. So an i3 is a good CPU that we use for a lot of entry level business computing needs, computers that are used in an office for email and word processing and internet browsing. An i3 would be an adequate solution. They have anywhere from two to four cores. Rarely does it have multi threading enabled. But it’s a good basic CPU that’s going to do a lot of a lot of office related or home related tasks, right? Then the next step up is the i5, the i5 is probably the CPU that I recommend most commonly. I like the additional cores, the additional architecture, more bandwidth, higher clock speeds, the difference in cost of a computer system between an i3 and an i5, on average is about $100

Monica Pitts  

Okay, well so it seems so you would go with the i5 then.

Jamie Cote  

If you consider all the same specifications, and just spend an extra $100 by increasing the processor, you may not see hardly any difference at the onset. An i3 and i5 will do all the basic things the same way. What we find though is the longevity of the computer system, the i5 has remained a relevant computer system three and four and even five years down the road, where those i3s will will antiquate themselves a little more quickly as everything else around them increases in speed requirements, right, yeah, all the updates to your browser. And now you’re running a new version of Adobe. And you’ve added a different antivirus solution that has higher requirements. So three years down the right the line, it might tap out the capabilities of an i3 a little more quickly than an i5. So I think that’s a good value play. So the next step is the i7. And then after that is the i9, the i9 is really just for specialized markets where you’re running applications that take advantage of all the extra cores. Those are the big dogs that have lots and lots of cores and high clock speeds. And you’re thinking somebody that’s making movies, somebody that’s rendering 3d images, a gaming enthusiast with lots of money to spend on on that activity, right? They’re the most expensive CPU and they do the most. So the i7 is really another really common one. So if you fall in that middle ground of somebody who’s running applications that that need a lot of horsepower, then the i7 is a good fit for you typically, and just depends on what you’re running and how quickly you need things to to respond to decide between the i7 and the i9, which one makes more sense, from a financial standpoint, right? One of the things that’s nice about the i7, it’s the first Intel CPU on that line that has a feature called turbo boost. And what that will do is it will take if you have an application that’s really chewing up a lot of processing power, then the i7 will allocate more power to that one core, right. So if you have like eight cores, and they’re all running at a certain clock speed, let’s say 2.4 gigahertz, that the CPU intelligently without you telling it to do it will say hey, I need more power over here and clock that one core that that one software application is utilizing up to like four gigahertz, so it gives it more power to that one application. So the i7 would be something to use, if you are a power user, using multimedia applications, you’re a content creator, the i7 may be a good option for you to take a step above the i5.

Monica Pitts  

So it sounds like if I were a person who was just going to be blogging, like just typing in my blog and updating my blog, and I was going to maybe use a online photo editing service like Canva, I might be able to get away with having like an i5. But if I’m going to start doing things like video editing, even on a base level on my computer, or if I’m going to be using an installed image editing software, then I probably am going to need to go with something like an i7 because I need that extra horsepower. That I mean, because I have a really powerful computer that I’m sitting next to you right now that you built for me and it’s awesome. But I will still occasionally when editing video, especially just explode everything and it all locks up and it all shuts down. And I just have to restart the computer and move on. So does that sound right? Am I like hearing the information and spitting it out backwards? 

Jamie Cote  

Yeah, no, that’s really that’s a really good analysis of what I’ve said, in a good encapsulation, I think let’s the one thing I want to really delve into a little bit that I thought about earlier is specifications, right? So what’s more important than just saying, Well, theoretically, it sounds like this would be best for me, or this would be a lot of software manufacturers, almost every software manufacturer, especially those that have high requirements for processing power, they’ll have a list of recommended specifications on their website. So so that’s a good thing to start with. A lot of times it will say, if you’re running AutoCAD, right, it’ll say start here. And with this baseline knowledge of what these things mean, you can then take the requirements from the software vendor and say, okay, it saying here, I need an i7, which i7 now, right? Because even within the i7 line, there are different processors that have more or less, but more or fewer cores, or more or less computing power.

Monica Pitts  

So now that we understand about the processor, there’s other things.

Jamie Cote  

Yep. So we move to RAM now. Yeah, I want to know about the other things and let’s go through each of them. And I’ll be maybe a little faster with each of these a little more succinct. So RAM is another TLA random access memory or fun little three letter acronym. And RAM is used when you boot up your computer and it loads Operating System typical, typically Windows, right Windows 10, Windows 11. The RAM is is the part of the computer the memory that uses the things that are running on your computer. So when you boot into your your Windows operating system, it’s going to use some percentage of RAM. When those little things in your system tray the icons typically in the lower right hand corner by your, your date and time when those icons start popping up your antivirus and, you know some some drivers that are associated some of the windows, some are applications, those, those use a percentage of your RAM as well. Then when you open up a web, a web browser, more RAM, open up other tab more RAM. So a fun little trick that we use a lot when people are complaining about power is if you right click and you can follow along with me if you want. If you’re on your computer, just right click on the taskbar somewhere right at the bottom of the screen, not on an icon but on the blank space. And you’ll see an option usually like third up from the bottom says Task Manager.

Monica Pitts  

Oh yeah, that’s my friend. 

Jamie Cote  

So if you go to task manager, and you click on the Performance tab, okay, you’ll see memory. Yeah, you can click on memory on the left, it will tell you the total amount of memory that is installed. Okay, you see that, and then it’ll show the percentage of memory that you’re utilizing right now.

Monica Pitts  

I’m using 80%. 

Jamie Cote  

You’re maxing it out, I have 16 gigs available, and I’m using 64% of mine. What probably happens, Monica, when you talked earlier about your computer just kind of locking up? My guess is that it’s reached the RAM capacity, it’s maxing out RAM, and it just doesn’t know what to do and it just chokes and then a reboot frees up all the other resources, right? So it gives you more of that random access memory or RAM to use. But this can help people to see how much RAM am I using and you can actually click down into like processes. If you go back to processes instead of the Performance tab. It can it shows you not just the percentages, but it’ll show you which applications are using how much RAM.

Monica Pitts  

Google Chrome is blowing me up. It’s because I have like 400 tabs open.

Jamie Cote  

Yep, yep, Chrome will do that I’m using Chrome also, it’s using like one and a half gigs, 1.5 megabytes, 1.5 1000 megabytes. So 1.5 gigs of memory right now on my system as well. And then all the other things. So this is a good way to kind of see what what’s using your RAM, and maybe how to more efficiently manage the RAM that you have, you can go here and just start up you’ll see that tab. From that tab, you can see the processes that are enabled, at boot up. And if you go and right click on those and then disable them. If it’s not a critical thing. If it’s like Dropbox or iTunes or, you know, whatever it is it’s launching at startup, you can disable those and Skype, right QuickBooks, Update Manager.

Monica Pitts  

I’ve been wondering because Cisco WebEx meetings starts on startup all the time, and I never have a WebEx meeting. I have one client that uses them. And I’m like, why does it keep doing this?

Jamie Cote  

WebEx thinks itself important and decides that you need to start it up every single time you start your computer. So by going here, as as described, and disabling that process, it will still be installed on your computer, it will just tell Windows don’t launch this when you start up and start stealing your RAM. 

Monica Pitts  

Oh my gosh, I’m disabling things all over the place.

Jamie Cote  

And what on your next reboot, you might find that that 80% lowers to 45 or 50 or 60, even with the same applications open?

Monica Pitts  

Fine. Well, and I just closed my audio editing program and managed to save myself 4%. So now I’m just taking 76% of my RAM.

Jamie Cote  

Those changes don’t take effect until after a reboot.

Monica Pitts  

I just enabled stuff and disabled. 

Jamie Cote  

That’s correct. Yep. All right. So RAM is important. And then from a purchasing standpoint, I wouldn’t recommend a computer these days with less than 16 gigs of RAM. Just because it’s so inexpensive, you can find a lot of them with eight. But like if I’m building a computer in the store, for a client, the cost difference between the two is only like $40 or $50. And so to double the amount of RAM you have from eight to 16, just to ensure that you have enough moving forward is kind of a no brainer, right?

Monica Pitts  

I’m writing that down. That’s why you can hear me typing. Like, no, I wouldn’t recommend with anything less than 16 gig.

Jamie Cote  

16 would be a good starting point. And then again enthusiasts, right media content creators, people using applications that really demand a lot of RAM. And that’s the thing too is a little research on what you’re using, what software you’re using, and where it’s pulling the resources from. Some applications are CPU intense. So some are RAM intensive, others are GPU intensive. And we’ll get to that here just in just a minute. Right? Another day another TLA, right, another three letter acronym. They’re all TLAs. So the the point that I want to emphasize, I’ve been thinking this in the back of my mind, but since it’s kind of at the forefront right now, there’s an adage that I use. Well, let me finish my thought first, and I’ll come to this, the thought is, do a little research on the primary application you’re going to use and see where it would benefit from throwing money at the most right, a little faster CPU more RAM, or, in some instances, and an adage that I use is, you know, you’ve heard a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Yeah, I computer’s only as fast as its slowest component. So if you have one piece of all of these, you know, the pieces, this is a puzzle, right? You have all these pieces. And if one piece of the puzzle here is lacking, then that’s going to slow down your whole computer, all the process will bottleneck there, right? Like the chain, if it’s weak, it will break there or slow everything down. So we’ve talked about CPU, we’ve talked about RAM, a lot of computers these days will handle 64 gigs, even up to 128 gigs for power users, right? I would say 95% of all users would be adequate with 16 to 32.

Monica Pitts  

Okay, so my bloggers or my marketers, even if they’re making and editing some videos will probably be okay with 32.

Jamie Cote  

Yeah, but they have the extra money and they want to throw it at it and not play around and go to 64. It won’t be a considerable amount of money more. But it’s a pretty rare circumstance. It’s a very specialized computer that we’re building as more than 64 gigs of RAM, we build computers for law enforcement agencies that then our forensics computers, so they process a lot of data. And those are some that we that we kind of put in that specialized area with 128 to 256 gigs of RAM and an i9 CPUs and really high end components. So RAM any questions on RAM, is that helpful?

Monica Pitts  

No, I was just thinking of a good example for you’re only as strong as its weakest or slowest component. And I thought, well, if you got an i9, and you only had eight gigs of RAM, then it wouldn’t even necessarily be the right computer for you, because you wouldn’t do what you thought it was gonna do.

Jamie Cote  

And you brought up something interesting that doesn’t specifically relate to our conversation, but also relates in a different way to what we’re talking about here, sorry, I get distracted for a second. So if what you’re doing is, if you’re using your computer to edit videos, and then upload to YouTube, you might be really mad at your computer, because it’s taking 17 hours to upload your videos. Without recognizing that that has nothing to do with your computer functionality. It’s all about the upload on your you know this because of your relationship with internet service providers historically and what your brother does. And so another thing to consider is is the totality of technology that sometimes your computer is not the culprit for why it’s not working. It could be slow internet, download speeds, upload speeds, other things that are, you know, connected peripherals. So I just thought I’d throw that in really quickly. While I was thinking about it.

Monica Pitts  

When my husband and I worked at home during COVID. He would be like the second that I started uploading stuff, because I would work locally so that I didn’t completely max out the bandwidth for him all day long. But then I would start uploading stuff eventually because my team would need it. And he would be like, what does happen? And he’s like, so mad. He’s the internet is just crap. And I’m like, actually, no, I just like, I just took all of it. Uploaded out my friend sorry about that.

Jamie Cote  

Service, a professional services firm locally, who were complaining about their internet not working at all, we could see that it was working. But they couldn’t do anything, they couldn’t browse the web. After analyzing logs in their firewall, we were able to pinpoint that it was a phone on their wireless. And every time that this person would come back from lunch and connect to WiFi, it would upload all their photos to Cloud Storage. Oh my god, they didn’t have a lot of upload speed at that time. So clogged their upload. And so if your uploads clogged, then you can’t download or make requests because then you’re you’re no the internet can’t send those requests back to your computer. So it took down the entire internet because somebody who’s connecting their phone to the WiFi and uploading photos.

Monica Pitts  

Yeah, Travis and Stacy. So Stacy is my right hand gal over here. And you know her too. They’re like the people that know how to figure out all that stuff about the internet and they’re like, oh, no, it’s these than that. And one day Travis was like oh man Monica something’s just killing your internet over there. Um, but he didn’t tell me this. You just feel like disabled it and then it turned out that it was like my own phone and I was like, Travis like you just it was like something that I use every day. I mean like that. I blame the internet on that thing. But he’s like it just he was blowing everything up, Monica anyway. So all right. So back to the components we had. We just talked about RAM. And now what? Okay, SSD? Is that the next thing?

Jamie Cote  

Sure. Yeah. So next is is storage, right hard drive. And in the past, we similarly right. So it was this stretch for capacity, you had these big clunky old drives mechanical drives with spindles, and cylinders, and then they spin around. And it took a really, really long time to locate anything on them that for the longest time, that was the bottleneck on high performance computers, because the CPU and the RAM were ready to go and, and, you know, the computer was searching for information on these old clunky hard drives. So the the SSD is I think, first came out about probably about 10 to 12 years ago, looking at the oh, 06, have they been around for a while honestly,

Monica Pitts  

Do you like the equivalent of a really fancy jumpdrive it just say you save stuff to it.

Jamie Cote  

So an SSD is solid state drive. So what happened is, is kind of like with the processors, the big innovation to multicore, the hard drive manufacturers went from these these disk drives to solid state drives. So the technology changed completely. And it is solid state memory. So it’s a lot like RAM or a flash drive, right, which runs much, much faster than these other drives. The problem initially was there really were cost prohibitive,per gigabyte, they were the first SSDs that came out cost like $1,000. And they were very, very small. And nobody was going to put them in a computer unless it was a really, really high end computer for a very specific application. So over time, and we’re at the point now where it’s become the standard, so it is still much more expensive to manufacture them. And so while you can go out and buy a four terabyte hard drive of the older variety, for like $120 $150, right, for a good performing one, you can probably find an eight terabyte for around that same price to in that price range, you’re really only going to find like a one terabyte solid state hard drive. So they’re much much faster. The boot time on computers. Anecdotally, right, so I had a laptop 12 years ago, that was just it was like four years old and just slow was taking two to three minutes to boot up. And applications were taking forever to launch. And going back to that chain analogy right the link in the chain. The only thing that I did was took an image of my old laptop hard drive and copied it over to a new SSD, and then put that SSD in place. And my boot times went from two minutes to 15 seconds. Applications were opening instantly. And then we can tell that was the bottleneck all along was the hard drive. So almost every computer or laptop, desktop or laptop that you’re going to purchase these days will come with a solid state hard drive, I would hope and this is getting a little bit into the weeds. There there are older style SSD hard drives that physically look more like a laptop hard drive a two and a two and a half inch form factor. Those aren’t as fast as the newer style. They’ve gone from M zeta to M.2. And then M.2 which fits in a little tiny slot on your motherboard. The latest innovations called NVME So I recognize this all nerdy, but if if the one thing you take from this is it has a solid state drive. That is NVME. If you see that NVME then you know that that’s the fastest technology available in SSD is currently

Monica Pitts  

NVME.

Jamie Cote  

Yeah, a four letter acronym somehow.

Monica Pitts  

Okay, so a really good computer would have a solid state drive that is an NVME. Now I just want to make sure that I totally get this. So a solid state drive is different from my RAM. They’re not the same things. They’re separate. And the RAM is the thing that lets all the programs get powered and in. But then the other thing that’s like what saves all my files and that kind of thing, right?

Jamie Cote  

Yeah, correct. So we talked about RAM as being temporary storage for things that are active. The SSD is your hard drive, and it’s permanent storage. So that’s where all the files for your operating system said all of your Word files, all of your, the projects you’ve created, all reside on your hard drive. So you don’t when you shut off your computer. They’re all still they’re on your SSD. Yeah, they’ve disappeared from your RAM, but they’re all still on your SSD. So sizing that really just depends on what you’re doing. Right. So there are a lot of people who work with large files or lots have files are lots of large files. You can do that with external storage like a NAS, Network Attached Storage, get another TLA. Or you can with a desktop computer one of the reasons why I think higher performing I’d say users who require higher performing computers systems, may may lean toward a desktop, as opposed to a laptop is there’s just more versatility in terms of what you can do with it. And one of those things is have a solid state hard drive in it for the performance, but then put larger drives in just to hold long term data for archiving purposes or just to access files, when you need to move them around. That’s still a good idea. But the one thing, and this isn’t really, I think, on the target of what you were wanting to talk about, but I’ll bring it up anyway. Because we run into this too often. The SSD, the hard drive, the storage on your computer, is subject to fail, they go bad, their electronic parts, and so they crash, they fail, they glitch out. And so as I preach, preach, preach, if there’s anything on there, you don’t want to lose, make sure you have a good backup solution that then replicates that information to an external storage source, like an external hard drive, flash drive. Cloud services are lots of ways to backup your stuff. We won’t get into that right now. Just make sure it’s backed up because hard drives do fail.

Monica Pitts  

Yeah, we recently interviewed Travis about Google Workspace. And hey, that makes me think that we actually save all of our files out there. And then only the things that I’m going to work on locally for a little while live on a computer, and then they hop off, because they’re bigger files, they don’t even live on my computer. So when I look at SSD on a listing for computer, there’s a number sometimes next to it, and it looks a lot like the number that hangs out next to ram. Is there a gig or terabytes the name of or that you would tell people that they need? Or marketing computer?

Jamie Cote  

That’s a good question. I’m glad you asked that I meant to talk about that. So yeah, the size of the SSD, they’ve become smaller, but you still have to have, you know, a certain amount that really depends. What I did say is it depends on what you’re doing with it. But kind of like what I did with the RAM in terms of baseline, there are a lot of computers available with 256 gigs, gigabytes, GB, that’s one quarter of a terabyte, right? If you’ve seen that, go that that terminology a terabyte versus a gigabyte. And for context, a computer with just the operating system installed and some pre installed software, before you even start loading it up with your own personal stuff, probably going to use 30, 40, 50 gigs of space, leaving you with like only about 120 150 gigs. Before you get into that scary space where your harddrive is almost full. That’s not a lot of room. And there’s not a big difference between the 256 cost wise, right between the 256 and a 500, 512, you’ll see a 480, a 500 a 512 depending on how they’re manufactured. But that 500 gig range would be my recommendation for starting point for any SSD.

Monica Pitts  

Okay, so I’m up to an i5 or an i7 with 16 to 32 gigabytes of RAM and an SSD that has 480 or 512 gigs,

Jamie Cote  

Somewhere in that range. So yeah, 500 gigs the 480, 500, 512 are the three numbers you’ll see, for the solid state hard drives that are in that rings, about a half a terabyte, right? Yeah, you can go a terabyte, you can go to a two terabyte, but anything beyond that is cost prohibitive and probably unnecessary. If your storage needs are beyond that, just get yourself a 500 gig SSD or a one terabyte SSD, and then get external storage or internal storage using the older technology, it’s going to be more cost effective to do that. 

Monica Pitts  

Okay, I’m learning everyone else is learning do this is actually kind of fun.

Jamie Cote  

One more thing I wanted to talk about one more component. So we don’t I don’t think we need to delve too deeply into like motherboard or WiFi controllers, things like that. Those are pretty straightforward. There are some differences and somebody working on a real specialized project will want to know some of the differences in terms of features and expandability. Those are things that I can help out with or any anybody who has, you know, knowledge of hardware, but the GPU, the video card is the last thing that I think is important for people that want to know about right? 

Monica Pitts  

GPU, I’m typing that down, GPU. Say, Okay, tell me about the GPU.

Jamie Cote  

Yeah, it’s your video card, right. So years ago, again, there was a transition from what we call a discrete video card, meaning it has its own dedicated RAM, right. It has its own memory on board for processing video data And then there was a transition just to save costs were where it wasn’t required to put the video card on the motherboard to have an integrated or embedded video card. Nowadays, there’s a shift five or six years ago, where the video cards are now on the CPU oddly, so your processor comes with the video, usually, with the video capabilities built into it. And then the motherboard has has the output for it. So what does the video card do? It allows you to display things on your screen, right. And so a video card that is onboard or embedded or has shared memory. So it uses memory from your system, that that motherboard or that video card is going to be great for any two dimensional business type applications. For Office applications, email, all of those types of things, right. So having an onboard or a built in an embedded video card is adequate for all of those types of users. When you start getting into more specialized applications, video editing, content creation, right? Gaming, rendering of 3d images, like a lot of CAD programs, SolidWorks those types of things have video requirements. And that’s where you’re gonna look on the manufacturers website and say, what do you recommend, there are video cards that cost 1000s of dollars, we’ve installed them in specialized computers. For those very specific purposes. Usually, it’s video editing or rendering those those large types of architectural files. But video card is essential for some of those applications. And you should really take direction on which make which model and just the processing power that it has. NVIDIA is one of the lines of NVIDIA and AMD are kind of the two big lines of video card manufacturers. Again, we have a tendency to go with the NVIDIA side versus the AMD. NVIDIA has a line called the Quadro line, which is really the workstation space for the high end forensic stuff for video editing and for like CAD design, right. But then you have the gaming cards, you’ve probably heard of like the NVIDIA, there’s like the GTX, and the RTX, and the TI and they’re all these little terms that go along with them. There are too many too much terminology to dig into to really make sense of it, I think in a in a format like this. But a lot of options for video, a massive price range, a big difference in performance, in terms of the speed of the GPU, right kind of like your CPU with clock speeds, and also the the amount of RAM that’s installed on on your video card, and the price accordingly. So just do research there and figure out what you need and try to get the best value equation right bang for my buck on the video card. 

Monica Pitts  

When I think of stuff like that, that can make me work faster. I always feel like it’s an investment in my company, when I choose the right thing, even if it is more expensive, because waiting around. Like we have huge files that we make for tradeshow banners. And so if we don’t have the right computer to do it on, or like if I’m making my videos on my bed, it’s sluggish. It just takes so much time and that time is is money, like the client doesn’t want to pay for me to not have to restart my computer and they’re not going to. So I need a tool that will allow me to do my job efficiently. And so I just feel like it’s an investment in my business to be able to work efficiently, it would be like having a car that doesn’t break down or a dump truck that doesn’t break down. If what I did was altered. If the dump truck not rolling, you don’t get paid. It’s the same thing with my computer. Okay, so I did have like two more questions for you. And then I feel like we can wrap up. Okay, you touched on it a little bit. Laptop versus desktop. And it feels like for some of those bigger video editing and content creation tasks, like desktop might be a better solution, because you can get a more specialized, possibly more powerful beast for you to work on. But what is your what are your thoughts on desktop versus laptop for the types of things a marketer would do?

Jamie Cote  

Yeah, um, I wrote a piece years ago for a local publication. And this was around the time if you can remember back to commercials when Apple was running their I’m a Mac, I’m a PC type of thing. And they had somebody that was in the Mac world that wrote a piece on I’m a Mac, like the benefits of Apple and the Apple platform. And then they asked me to write one on the benefits of, of Windows or the PC platform. I think they were maybe a little surprised because I didn’t really write it from the perspective of PCs are better because of this. I what I what I focused on and I think it’s The answer to this question is, technology is available. And it’s varied because there are lots of applications for what you need. So it’s really just about finding the right tool for the job. To me, as I’m looking at this Windows laptop, knowing that at home, I have a Windows desktop that I have an iPad next to me and an Android phone, I’m not really beholden to any one platform of technology, I have different tools for different things. And the same is true when it comes down to whether you need a desktop or a laptop, right? Obviously, the big advantage of a laptop is the mobility. So if if you need to be portable, if you need to be able to do the things that you do at the office with the will to take it home, and have that same level of processing power, then a laptop is something that look at, I’m a lot more comfortable with laptops, just personally speaking. On the basic computing side, when you start getting into the high end applications, there are some really great tools out there and some high end laptops, the problem becomes the the more power that you utilize the more power of your processing, whether it’s your CPU or your GPU, all those things, the more heat that that it generates. And so when you have everything condensed down into the smaller space, without a lot of ventilation, what we see is very expensive components that are all soldered together and not interchangeable, burning out more quickly failing. So you spend $3,000 on this really awesome laptop, but two and a half years into it, your video card goes out, it’s like $1,200 to replace the entire motherboard because it has that very expensive video card on it too. I love desktops for the high end computing, there’s more ventilation, the ability to replace an individual component. If your expensive video card does go out, you still can use the rest of your computer and just replace the video card. More expandability desktops as a general rule will accept more RAM the higher end of capacity of RAM right how much it will take typically more on a desktop than on a laptop even on a higher end laptop. And so those are the reasons why for higher end computing, I prefer a desktop recognizing that in some circumstances, somebody just needs to be able to take it from place to place and they can’t lug around a big tower. And that’s why there’s a market for high end laptops and we sell those, it’s just what are you using the tool for?

Monica Pitts  

Awesome. Okay, anything else that you feel like people need to know, before they? I mean, you give so much advice I feel I understand now more than I ever have a right to go out and buy a computer for myself to do marketing. I mean, like I was telling Jamie before we got started the last time we went out and bought a laptop, I sent my dad an email and I said I need a laptop to do these three things. Give me three laptops to pick from, I’m gonna buy one of them. And he was like, Okay, here’s the one, girlfriend and I said, Okay, awesome. And that’s how I bought my computers. And I’m way smarter, way smarter. Okay. So that being said, Is there anything else that you think people need to know? As we wrap up?

Jamie Cote  

I mean, nothing that jumps out. One question that I get quite a bit is Windows 10, or Windows 11. I think it’s more relevant in a business environment. We haven’t seen a lot of products. So Windows 11 seems to be a good platform. Anyone who’s followed Microsoft for the last 30 years, knows that every every time there’s a really good and reliable operating system, there seems to be a real bomb in between, right? Like Windows Millennium, or, you know, there are different windows eight wasn’t very good or very popular either, right didn’t last very long. But Windows 11 seems to be a good and reliable operating system. We haven’t run into a lot of compatibility issues. So as a general rule, if you’re saying should I go with one of the other elevens the more recent version, it seems to have worked out any problems that were actually from the get go, there weren’t significant issues with Windows 11. So I can endorse Windows 11. The only exception to that is if you if you’re in a business environment with specific applications that may not yet be certified for Windows 11. It may be safer to stay with Windows 10. But your IT director or your IT consultants will probably make that recommendation.

Monica Pitts  

Okay, so, last but not least, will you let people know how they can get in contact with you if potentially they need your services? Or maybe they just want to learn more about some of your managed services instead of just buying a computer for you? 

Jamie Cote  

Of course, yeah, we’re on the web but personalized-computers.com. My email address is jamie@personalized-computers.com. You can find us on Google. It’ll bring you right to our address which is on the south side of I 70 on i 70 Dr. We’re in the Woodridge Business Center down in the back. We’re happy to have you call or stop by or email me with any questions you might have.

Monica Pitts  

Thank you. Okay, and thank you to everybody else out there who listened with me and learned all of these amazing things about computers. Thank you so much Jamie for being with us. And if you like me enjoyed this episode or if you learned a thing or two, please give us a review wherever you’re listening because when you review our podcasts, it helps us meet more people just like you who are on a journey and trying to solve their problems through technology. So thank you so much for listening. And until next time, go forth and market with purpose.