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11.13.2024

What I Learned

I know I talked about technology last week, but I have recently been shopping for a new laptop and I went down the rabbit hole trying to decide which one to buy so I have some things to share so that you don't have to do the same thing. I have only ever purchased one laptop in my life. It is the one I am using now, and I bought it in 2015 and I spent what I considered too much on it. The reason for this is that my boss, who is very impetuous about some things and liked to treat his family to nice things, told me that he was not going to give me a bonus unless I spent it on something "frivolous." I think he meant a fun trip or a nice hotel room or something, because when I showed him the receipt, he told me that my purchase was too practical. I am practical, but I spent nearly double on it than what I would have spent otherwise, so it was a splurge! Anyway, this has worked out, as I am still using this computer 10 years later, and it is still going strong. (PS many of the computers I looked at are well over what I paid 10 years ago! Sigh, inflation sucks). I cacluated that based on the amount of time that I have used it, it has cost me $0.27/day, well under the $1 per use rule!!

So why am I buying a new laptop? My current one is good for using the internet and word documents and things, but last year I bought a GoPro so that I could take some videos of my cycling and hiking adventures. This was great and the photo quality is excellent. However, it is so excellent that my poor old laptop does not have enough oomph to watch the videos. I will get into the details now. 

What does "oomph" mean? It means several things, and I will tell you now. There are three important things to look at, CPU, GPU and RAM. An honorable mention is disk space, but this is not as important as the first three. 

CPU (Central Processing Unit). Example: 14th Gen Intel Core i9-14900HX You have probably heard of Intel or AMD, and you probably have a little sticker on your new laptop that looks like this (or if you have a Mac, it may be ARM). 


What does this do, why is it important and what do all the numbers and letters mean? This processes data, and is often referred to as the CPU and is measured in GHz. If you are just using the internet, you only need like 2.5 GHz; if you are gaming or editing videos, you may need more like 4 GHz. 

The i9 (i7 etc.) is the model number and the higher the number after the i, the newer it is, so if you have a choice between i5 and i9, you may want to go with i9 (same thing for AMD, but it is Ryzen 5, 7, 9 etc.) The 14900HZ is a SKU, but the letter(s) at the end do matter, as it is power efficiency and goes in this order from least to most efficient: Y, U, P, H, HK, HZ (you can see them all or read more here). 

GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) Example: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060. This processes graphics and other visual data on a computer, so if you need fast moving graphics, you need a better GPU. NVIDIA GeForce is known to be one of the best, but also Intel and AMD have options. The numbers at the end are higher quality or newer as the number goes up, so 4050 would be older than 4060. The least expensive NVIDIA which would still be good for games/video editing would be the 3050. 

RAM (Random Access Memory) Example: 16GB RAM. This stores data that the processor needs to access quickly to run applications and open files. It allows for both reading and writing data. The higher the number, the better the performance. My current laptop only has 8GB of RAM, but it is pretty standard for most new ones to have at least 16GB and if you want to do games/videos, you may want at least 32GB. This is my current computer. You can see from the "memory" section that I am using 5.6/7.9 GB of RAM, and what I have open is only a few Chrome tabs and Excel sheets. If I want to do anything more complicated, I will soon run into issues. 



So let's talk about the honorable mention, disk space! Most computers now have SSD (Solid State Drives) which store data for you. What does this mean? If you have ever bought an external HD in the past, you will note that they whir a lot and make noises and sometimes sound like they are spinning and spinning. Those are probably HHD, which have a lot of moving parts. SSDs don't have moving parts (hence the "solid") and so not only are they faster and quieter, but I can travel with one without worrying about banging it on something and one of the parts breaking (and then ALL of your data is gone!) I have carried both my computer, which has an internal SSD, and an additional external SSD with me on my bike trip with no issues. 

Most computers now have at least 512GB of SSD disk space, which is probably enough for most people who just have documents and some photos stored on their computer. If you need more space, you can either buy a computer with 1TB, or you can buy a 1TB external SSD drive for under $100 (I like this one by SanDisk) and I just bought a 2TB for $129. So if you are buying a computer and it is an extra $300 for a 1TB vs a 512GB, just buy the 512GB and you can buy an external SSD when/if you need more. 

In case you are wondering, my current computer is a Lenovo Yoga Pro. Since it lasted me 10 years without any issues, I decided to go with another Lenovo and ended up getting the Legion 5i 16" Laptop 14th Gen Intel Core i9-14900HX - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 -  32GB RAM. And now you know what all of that means! The only downside to getting better components is that they make the laptop a lot heavier than I would like. But you have to pick your poison! 

Oh! One last thing; I ended up getting mine at Costco because they have a 90 day return policy (vs. 30 days for most of the others) and the price includes a two year warranty (plus one of the perks of the credit card I used is an extended one year warranty), McAfee for one year and technical support. They also ship in 4 days vs. 9-14 days for many of the others. I have had great success with Costco electronics and my family has bought three other computers and a television from them in the past! 

To summarize, in case you fell asleep, do you just want to blog, save some photos in a file, watch YouTube videos and read the internet? If yes, just get whatever, but maybe be sure it has at least the highest "i" number you can find within your budget and 16GB of RAM. Probably GPU won't really matter as much. 

If you want to do any games or video editing, get an CPU SKU with H or HZ at the end, an NVIDIA GPU, and at least 32GB of RAM. (PS You can also buy a Mac, which do not use any of these, as Apple is making their own versions of all these things as a combined unit now, but information about that is beyond my pay grade). 

If you haven't already, you can fill out this form with any questions you want answered for my upcoming ask me anything post!!

Have you ever bought a new laptop? What aspects did you consider? What did you end up going with in the end and why? 

This post is part of NaBloPoMo. You can find the rest of my posts for this challenge here. You can find the list of participants and their information here.

25 comments:

  1. I do have a laptop and I'm writing on it now. My considerations were: is it available at Costco, and is it less than the cost of the Costco dollars I have? Okay, done!

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    1. Isn't Costco the greatest!? I do love them so. When you say Costco dollars, do you mean the cash back that you get from the Visa? If so, good on you! I know you go to Costco a lot and being able to maximize those dollars spent is priceless (okay, maybe not technically priceless, but you know what I mean). I bought my Dad's laptop there too and it came with a two year warranty and Microsoft 365 for a year.

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  2. This was a terrifically informative post. My husband is the IT go-to in the house (and at his job), but I also like to be as well-informed as I can about the tech that I use. I don't do anything but access the Internet and write on my laptop (and play the occasional game of FreeCell), so I don't need much. My big requirement is good battery life.

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    1. You will have no issues then! My need for video editing/viewing really made it difficult! Last time I bought a laptop, I just went and bought the lightest one and it has served me well! I also bought the orange one because it was cheaper than the black and I did not care about the color. Easy!

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  3. Wow, I'll have to come back to this post when it's computer shopping time. Although- I do fall into the first category of users- I don't use my laptop for THAT much. Also, sometimes they sell used ones at my husband's school, and we've gotten a couple of those in the past.

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    1. I think that if you are a Mac user, you will have an easier time choosing, but they are pretty expensive. So if you can get that through your husband's job, you are good to go! Also if you don't care about graphics, you are probably good to go too!

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  4. We have a HP laptop we bought from Costco in maybe 2010 -- and it still works! So I understand brand loyalty. We also bought it from Costco and had to use their Concierge service for it so I also am loyal to Costco in buying electronics. I had "retired" that laptop for my newer one (HP also) 4yrs ago -- but my husband's All-In-One recently died (yes, HP, too...and is newer than my laptop but not by much) so my husband is using it now temporarily; he doesn't do anything but read and/watch news/videos online. But I am thinking of getting him another All-In-One for Christmas because he likes the larger screen and he's not one to drag a laptop around (he would rather "go to my office to get online" to browse). The one I was looking at on Costco website is out of stock...and I'm hoping it'll come back in-stock soon. Otherwise, there's a Asus one that is on sale, $300 off.

    To give a shorter answer (LOL), I look at certain brands, I send the link to my son who games and knows more about speed and memory, etc, and I look at prices. But yes, need to buy it from Costco for the reasons you mentioned.

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    1. Hahah! I need a son! Just kidding. I also have an all-in-one HP from Costco! However, I ended up not using it much due to my current situation (traveling) so I am not sure what I will do with it. My parents both use laptops, even though they are home a lot, so I guess I should sell it. I got tired of selling things earlier this year but maybe when I go home, it is time. Speaking of my parents, they both have Costco HP laptops too! They love them and the laptops are everything that they need and more. We are a Costco family (also side note, my brother's GF works there. Did you know that the employees do not get a discount?)

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    2. Ha ha! Sons do come in handy! LOL Our HPs are all we need as well. My son has his gaming computer (he knew about NVIDIA before it was popular because of the stock price) and a laptop he used for school. Oh, I didn't realize the employees do not get a discount! But I heard they get great benefits so maybe that makes up for it?

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    3. They get stock, which is nice! I had a coworker (a financial advisor) who loved NVIDIA, so I have been familiar with it for maybe a decade, and I remember his telling me to buy the stock in 2014/2015 when it was at around $30 and had not split at all yet. I did buy some, but not as early as he suggested, but if I had, it would have been like a 28,000% gain! I mean, I know we all have some stories (I also had a client who was employee #11 at AMD, and ran with a guy who was an early employee of Apple) like this, but I can't believe how much it has taken off.

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    4. Oh, nice! Even if you got in a little later, it's still a big growth! My son did a research paper for school on company social responsibilities and picked NVIDIA -- I think that was 2019. After that, he bought some stocks but of course, he was a college student not working so he didn't have a lot. The stock climbed up nicely then started to go down -- and he sold and made just enough profits to buy a pair of Gucci sneakers! LOL We met a man (older and wiser) in Europe in the summer who asked my son if he regrets spending money on those shoes after hearing the story, and my son said No! LOL

      Getting Costco stocks as a benefit is awesome!

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    5. I have learned that once you have decided to sell (or buy), you can't look back. I like your son's attitude about the sneakers; he is sticking by his decision!

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    6. Yes! And I supported his decision to buy those shoes because sometimes you just have to enjoy the fruits of your labor now. I mean not all of it, and not all the time -- but he tends to be very frugal anyway so I wanted him to taste a reward from his money habits/investment so he'd aim for gaining more/steadily in the future.

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  5. My son asked for a gaming computer and I have the feeling when we are done getting that (with his contributions in addition to our gifting) I will understand a whole lot more about what is important. I asked him to make me a detailed list of requirements and will go from there. It's crazy how much more demanding the new games are. Things changed really quickly.

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    1. So true! Even a 16GB RAM is not really fast enough for some of those games anymore. I do not play any games, so don't really know anything about that, but I think that screen resolution and bit rate and zzzzz blah, blah, blah are also important in gaming! I think my rabbit hole is deep enough for now though! Also be ready to pay a lot more for all of this stuff. A non gaming laptop may cost about a third of what a gaming one will cost.

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  6. We bought a new laptop for me in 2022 from Costco because of the warranty thing. I'll be honest with you, it's sort of a terrible laptop and I can't figure out how to fix some very annoying issues with it, but I just blog on it, so I don't worry about it too much!

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    1. Do tell! Which one did you buy because we need to avoid it if possible. Please don't tell me it was a Lenovo!

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  7. I'm a big fan of buying refurbished electronics. The last time that I bought a laptop (2013?), I went to Best Buy and tried different models to see what I wanted, and ended up liking Toshiba the best. I picked out a model with the bells and whistles that I wanted, hit up Google, and sure enough Toshiba was selling it as a refurb for a price that I wanted to pay.

    Then I got married and haven't had to buy a laptop since, because my husband has the gift of working for employers who shed their old computers. I have Downstairs Laptop, Upstairs/Travel Laptop, and TV Watching Laptop (aka the laptop connected to my TV with an HDMI cable so that I can watch TV while using Downstairs Laptop). What can I say, I'm a princess!

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    1. You married up! Haha. You are a princess. Well, to be fair, my first laptop was bought for me by my boyfriend at the time and it was great! I don't know any of the information about any of the specs, but I could do dial up AOL on it, and that is what mattered! Actually, at the time, I traveled, and I used to use it to journal, which was great too.

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  8. Very informative post. I appreciate this info. I just bought my son, Tank, a new laptop a few weeks ago. The one he got to use at college (I think it was a Dell) didn't last him the 4 years. What? Frustrating. I think I bought him a think pad. If that makes sense? I asked my brother, who knows more about computers than I do. I love the Costco tip. That warranty is a real help. I had no idea. Why don't we get our laptops there? Hmm. I bought an ACER laptop in Feb of 2020, because I was going to Ireland when my daughter was competing in World Championships for Irish dancing and I was taking a writing class and needed to be able to submit my homework while traveling. Of course, the competition was cancelled so I didn't 'need' a laptop since we have a desktop. But - I do use it a lot. I need to write a post about the shape of my laptop. It has not held up and it looks a lot older than its less than 4 years. Frustrating.

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    1. I think Think Pad is Lenovo, but maybe not. Or it used to be? We used to get Think Pads as our work computers back in the mid aughts, and they were great, albeit a bit heavy. Costco is great. Not only do they have the warranty, but if you just need a computer for school or internet browsing, you can get them for about $400. My first laptop was a Sony Viao and it probably lasted me 5 years, and then I had a Dell, which I think may have lasted about 7(?) The issue with both of them was that the operating system was old too, so you couldn't do updates and stuff after a certain point.

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  9. I don't know when this post was published but it has not yet come up in my Feedly, so that sucks. :/

    But thanks for sharing about all the things computery. I did not enjoy the read but know it's important to me as I love video editing. Storage of all my photos and videos needs several TB these days, so GB is not a question for me anymore, haha. And you haven't even mentioned backups here yet, also a important but boring subject. LOL.

    Enjoy your new computer!

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    1. I have several ways to backup. I store my photos on Google photos cloud and I have 1TB there. I also have Microsoft OneDrive cloud, and have 1TB+5GB there (and 1TB for each of my family members). I also have an external SSD - 1x1TB and 1x2TB where I back things up that I don't want to lose.

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  10. Like Hanna, I've got tons of photo & video files and do video editing too. I do everything on a MacBook Pro and I love it.

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    1. I have not used a Mac since the 90s and I have to admit that both the price point and making a change turns me off. Also I did have an iPhone back in the day but did not love some things about it, so usually stay away from Apple in general.

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