ON COMPUTERS

Factors simple in selecting next computer to purchase

This is the time of year when we get our most frequent reader question: What computer should I buy? It's also the easiest question we ever get; whatever you buy, you'll almost certainly love it.

The questioner usually wants a laptop; in fact, it's almost always a laptop. It's a good choice for most people. Bob dislikes them intensely because of the crowded keyboard and small screen. Joy likes them because they're portable.

One of the factors to consider in making your choice is weight -- not your weight, its weight. As we used to say in the newsroom: Keep it light and tight, and sometimes also trite.

So this gets us down to choices right away. Are you going to carry it around a lot? Are you going to carry it around at all? If you're not, so-called desktop or tower computers are nearly always cheaper, and you can choose your own monitor and keyboard. You'll need to add those, and they're both cheap these days. Desktop computers also have room for adding extra disk drives and memory.

What do you want to do with it? If it's going to be mostly for writing, browsing the Web, social networking and a few games once in awhile, you might like a Chromebook, which runs on Google's Chrome operating system. The advantages are low cost -- as low as $149, but can go up to $1,000 for heavy users -- and everything's online. In short, no software to buy or load; it's all out there online all the time. Another advantage is no viruses or so-called malware, because every time you start it up, Google scans for problems and fixes them. Last year for the first time, Chromebooks outsold Macbooks.

But what if you're a gamer? We mean, a really serious game player. You know, the big-screen action and adventure games. The action is fast, the scene changes need to be as quick as those in a movie, and the sound quality should be top-notch. This type of computer is usually a desktop, and companies that specialize in them have exotic names, like Corsair, AlienWare and CyberPowerPC.

Gaming computers often come with colored lights on the cases, and some of them are even liquid-cooled to handle the heat created by the microprocessors. These cost big bucks, several thousand dollars usually, and players may want to add extra monitors so they can see what's coming at them from the periphery.

If you like to do a lot of photo or video editing, you want a fast central processor and lots of memory. Make that tons of memory. It would also be nice to have solid-state drives instead of spinning disks. Solid state means that inside nothing is moving except electrons. Response time is essentially instantaneous. If you're editing video or creating special effects, you want that.

This same situation, but not as drastic, applies to music editing. Those are specialized computers, however, and if you're into musical performances, it's another ballgame and you already know about it.

So back to the real world and ordinary users: A few hundred dollars will be sufficient for something nice and fast enough for normal people. If it's a PC over $600, it should have an Intel i5 or i7 central processor or their equivalent from other chip makers, like AMD. The more random access memory, the better -- four to eight gigabytes are the usual choices. More RAM lets everything run faster.

New computers often come with huge hard drives. These have reached almost silly proportions, like going into the terabyte (trillion bytes) range, which few people have any need for but which is pumped up there as a sales tool. Movie buffs can dump their collections into these drives, but there's really no need.

Finally, does the brand matter? Not much. In fact, it matters so little, that we normally would pay no attention to the brand. If you've heard of it, they've been around for a while.

KINDLE UNLIMITED

If you read a lot, and listen to audio books, here's a way to save money. It's called Kindle Unlimited, and you get it from Amazon.

Kindle Unlimited is like a lending library. For $10 a month, you can take out 10 books at once. If you don't like a book, return it and choose another. Return them all as often as you like and get 10 more. There are more than 20,000 titles that are also available as audio books. You don't need a Kindle to read a Kindle book; you can download the app to your phone, tablet, or computer.

Amazon Prime Lending has a similar program and it's free for Prime members who pay $99 a year for lots of other perks, such as free shipping and many free movies. But Prime Lending has only a thousand titles. Kindle Unlimited includes 1.4 million books to choose from. However, many best-sellers and hot new releases are not included, nor are some major publishing houses. There are no books from Hachette, MacMillan, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins or Penguin for example.

INTERNUTS

NewYorker.com/cartoons/random will give you a random assortment of New Yorker cartoons. (We all know the cartoons are the best part.)

"Scientists design $100 muon detector." Search on that phrase to find how to make your own elementary particle detector. Muons are formed when cosmic rays hit our atmosphere, but since they only last 2.2 microseconds, they are hard to detect. You can count 50 times as many muons in an airplane as you can at sea level. Of course that means you're being hit by 50 times as many, but you won't feel a thing.

"Abuzz mosquito." Search on that phrase to join a group of mosquito mappers. There are 3,500 species of mosquito, but only around 25 spread disease. Abuzz is building a sound library and has already captured close to 1,000 hours of buzzing using phones. With that, they can map mosquito risks.

"Google Family Link" lets parents limit phone time and lock the phone at bedtime. They can also lock the phone if it gets lost and reset the password.

Bob and Joy Schwabach can be reached by email at bobschwa@gmail.com and joydee@oncomp.com.

Business on 12/09/2017

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