decide that you need to buy a new PC, and then spend a couple weeks brushing up on the details — price, storage, size, processor, memory — and doing lots of comparison shopping. You end up at your local Computers Are Us shop, and the guy behind the counter convinces you that the best bargain you’ll ever see is sitting right here, right now, and you better take it quick before somebody else nabs it.
Your eyes glaze over as you look at yet another spec sheet and try to figure out one last time whether a RAM is a ROM, whether a solid-state drive is worth the effort, and whether you need a SATA 6 Gbps, or NVMe, or USB 3 or C. In the end, you figure that the person behind the counter must know more than you, so you plunk down your credit card and hope that you got a good deal.
The next Sunday morning, you look at the ads on Newegg (www.newegg.com) or Best Buy (www.bestbuy.com) or Amazon (www.amazon.com) and discover that you could have bought the same PC for 20 percent less. The only thing you know for sure is that your PC is hopelessly becoming out of date, and the next time you’ll be smarter about the entire process.
YOU MAY NOT NEED TO PAY MORE TO GET A CLEAN PC
I hate it when the computer I want comes loaded with all that nice, “free” crapware. I would seriously consider paying more to get a clean computer. You do not need an antivirus and internet security program preinstalled on your new PC. It's going to open and beg for money next month. Windows 11 comes with Windows Security (formerly known as Windows Defender), and it works great — for free.
Browser toolbars? Puh-lease.
You can choose your own internet service provider. AT&T? Verizon? Who needs you?
And trialware? Whether it's Quicken or any of a zillion other programs, if you must pay for a preinstalled app in three months or six months, you don’t want it.
If you're looking for a new computer but can't find an option to buy a PC without all the extras, look elsewhere. The big PC companies are slowly getting a clue, but until they clean up their act, you may be better served buying from a smaller retailer who has not yet presold every bit that isn't nailed down. Or you can buy directly from Microsoft: Its Surface tablets and laptops are as clean as the driven snow. Pricey. But blissfully clean.
The online Microsoft Store sells new, clean computers from major manufacturers. Before you spend money on a computer, check to see whether it's available crapware free (usually at the same price). Go to www.microsoftstore.com and choose any PC. The ones on offer ship without any of the junk.
If you bought a new computer with all that gunk, you can get rid of it by performing a reset or reinstall. See Book 8, Chapter 2 for details.
If that describes your experiences, relax. It happens to everybody. Take solace in the fact that technology evolves at an incredible pace, and many people can’t keep up with it. As always, I’m here to help and share everything you need to know about buying a Windows 11 PC:
Decide if you’re going to use a touchscreen. Although a touch-sensitive screen is not a prerequisite for using apps on Windows 11, you’ll probably find it easier to use apps with your fingers than with your mouse. Swiping with a finger is easy; swiping with a trackpad works well, depending on the trackpad; swiping with a mouse is a disaster. However, if you know that you won't be using Windows 11 apps or Android apps optimized for touch from the Microsoft Store, a touchscreen won’t hurt but probably is not worth the additional expense. Experienced, mouse-savvy Windows users often find that using a mouse and a touchscreen at the same time is an ergonomic pain in the arm. Unless you have fingertips the size of pinheads — or you always use a stylus — using classic Windows programs on a touchscreen is an excruciating experience. Best to leave the touching to apps that are demonstrably touch-friendly. There is no substitute for physically trying the hardware on a touch-sensitive Windows 11 computer. Hands come in all shapes and sizes, and fingers, too. What works for size XXL hands with ten thumbs (present company included) may not cut the mustard for svelte hands and fingers experienced at taking cotton balls out of medicine bottles.
Get a screen that’s at least 1920 x 1080 pixels — the minimum resolution to play high-definition (1080p) movies. You probably want to stream movies from Netflix and watch videos on YouTube. For a pleasant experience, don't get stingy when purchasing a monitor. Make sure that it's at least full HD – meaning that it has 1920 x 1080 pixels in resolution. Going higher makes for an even better experience. Therefore, if you have the cash, you won’t be sorry if you buy a 1440p or a 4K display.
If you’re going to use the old-fashioned Windows 7–style desktop, get a high-quality monitor, a solid keyboard, and a mouse that feels comfortable. If you are upgrading your computer and love your keyboard and mouse, you may want to keep them. Corollary: Don't buy a computer online unless you know that your fingers are going to like the keyboard, your wrist will tolerate the mouse, and your eyes will fall in love with the monitor.
Go overboard with hard drives. In the best of all worlds, get a computer with a solid-state drive (SSD) for the system drive (the C: drive) plus a large hard drive for storage. For the low-down on SSDs, hard drives, backups, and putting them all together, see the upcoming section “Managing disks and drives.” How much hard drive space do you need? How long is a string? Unless you have an enormous collection of videos, movies, or songs, 1TB (=1,024GB = 1,048,576MB) should suffice. That's big enough to handle about 1,000 broadcast-quality movies. Consider that the printed collection of the US Library of Congress runs about 10TB.If you’re getting a laptop or ultrabook with an SSD, consider buying an external 1TB or larger drive at the same time. You will use it. External hard drives are cheap and plug-in easy to use.Or you can just stick all that extra data in the cloud, with OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or some competitor. For what it's worth, I used Dropbox in every phase of writing this book.
Looking inside your PC
It's time to share some information about the inner workings of a desktop or laptop PC. The big box that your desktop computer lives in is sometimes called a CPU, or central processing unit (see Figure 1-5). Right off the bat, you're bound to get confused, unless somebody clues you in on one important detail: The main computer chip inside that big box is also called a CPU. I prefer to call the big box “the PC” because of the naming ambiguity, but you’ve probably thought of a few better names.
Courtesy of Dell Inc.
FIGURE 1-5: The enduring, traditional desktop PC.
The big box contains many parts and pieces (and no small amount of dust and dirt), but the crucial, central element inside every PC is the motherboard. (You can see a picture of a motherboard here: www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/PRIME/PRIME-Z590-V).
