Thanks saylor, I'm not too far off from where Carmine is on this. I have a 2010 HP laptop. I was a loyal Dell customer but the last desktop in 2008 had hard drive problems from early in its life. Because I know I'm pretty ignorant I spent lots of time on their shopping site and spec'ed the one I think I wanted, then I call sales and customer support to get my few remaining questions answered... no straight answers and two of the folks had Indian accents so thick I couldn't understand them at all.
I called HP and talked to a nice guy in Texas who helped me put in my order. This one has been good to me, cost about $500 has a 17" monitor (I have vision problems) Its an i3 processor, Windows 7, 64bit, but I couldn't spec it out more than that. I try to make sure I buy a quality machine that has enough oomph to continue to be functional for a long time. I can buy office through work very cheap, but find I don't use it enough to matter (they don't allow us to work from home at all).
I was going to upgrade a year ago, but when I tried windows 10 on this machine it was a nightmare. I have been holding off since. Mine still works, I have found that Microsoft has been predatory with their updates and my machine will start doing all sorts of stuff in the background killing my memory. I simply dropped my savable information onto a jump drive and formatted the darn thing and disallow updating on most items. If I get it too screwed up I format again now.
I run windows 7, firefox, and malwarebytes... it still works for my purposes, except my CD/DVD drive is on the fritz... a replacement would need to have one , which is getting to be more and more uncommon. I replaced the battery with an bigger one a few years ago and all is still good for me there...
My hope is in a year or so, whatever follows Windows 10 will be out and I can skip ten entirely. My employer is still on 7 too, so I have no more exposure to 8 or 10 than my failed attempts to work with them. I am so pissed at Microsoft I have even thought about Mac but I am way too cheap for this to be a likely direction. I function well enough with what I have, but I realize I will eventually have to change too.
BTW, I don't speak Indian, so any extended service plans are a complete waste for me. I am the guy who would tell tech support "this computer didn't come with a wall". SSD are still expensive, maybe a little longer the pricing will get to my comfort level. Please feel free to point out where I am wrong or could do something better... I'm slow, but can learn.
