What's Your Budget?

Hello to everyone that actually reads these posts. I will try to keep this short, sweet and to a point.

Whenever anyone asks me about what type of system they should buy, whether it be desktop, laptop, netbook, mobile device or whatever, my first question back to them is usually: ‘What’s your budget?’.

It surprises me when people don’t have that in mind, as there is such an enormous swing in price ranges these days. But, if you give me a budget, my next directive is always: ‘Try to get the biggest bang for your buck’.

This is when I get the questions about RAM, MHz, Hard Drive Storage, etc. and what it all means. There are a lot of crazy numbers and letters mixed up on those sale ads at your favorite store or website and they can be a bit confusing.

I know I teased you all about slow computers recently, but it is true that they are never as fast again as the first time you turned them on and booted it up. However, if you are willing to spend some money, (See Title), you could get faster RAM, or better yet, an SSD! Also known as a Solid State Drive.

Yes, the ‘flash drive’ of hard drives is now available for less than $1000 in various configurations and sizes and they CAN make your computing experience much faster at boot up, load times and switching windows.

Unfortunately, to get the most out of them you need the latest and greatest of everything. But that doesn’t mean you can’t see a significant benefit if you are willing to pay for it. Of course your data must be copied to the new drive and the new drive set as your boot device and that is when things get tricky, but laptops and desktops can see a real boost from this upgrade.

But that is like most of life, isn’t it? If you are willing to pay the ‘n’ price, you can get the ‘x’ benefit. I guess the next question I should ask would be ‘Is it worth it?’.

When it’s only one system, it’s yours and for your home, then it may well be. The problem becomes more thorny when you have 50 systems and they are 3 – 5 years old. Maybe then, not so much. After all, our outside life span for business computers is 3 – 5 and if you are going to spend any money at all, it may as well be for a new system with a full warranty.

If you are buying a new system, do yourself a favor and go for the one that already has the SSD and as much RAM as you can fit into it. It will likely be faster and last longer than any computer you have had before.

BTW, Apple will likely be coming out with the iPad3 any day now (3/7/12?) and when they do, the price for the iPad2 will likely drop by $100 immediately. I have never been one to have ‘bleeding edge’ technology, mostly because version 1.0 of anything is for suckers. So in sticking with the theme of budgets and buck bangs, if you REALLY want a mobile device that has that Apple logo, get ready to plunk down your money when the price drop happens soon.

For those that are thinking about the SSD upgrade and have questions, let me know. Just make sure you have a budget in mind. LOL!

Aloha!

Brian
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