Take solace in the fact that technology evolves at an incredible pace, and nobody can keep up with it.
Decide if you’re going to use a touchscreen. Although a touch-sensitive screen is not a prerequisite for using apps on Windows 10, 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 reasonably well, depending on the trackpad; swiping with a mouse is a disaster. However, if you aren't into Windows 10 apps from the Microsoft Store that are optimized for touch, a touchscreen probably isn't 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’s no substitute for trying the hardware on a touch-sensitive Windows 10 computer. Hands and fingers come in all shapes and sizes. 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.See the section “Inside a touch-sensitive tablet” later in this chapter.
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. To enjoy the experience, do not get stingy when buying the monitor. Make sure that it's Full HD, which means it has 1920 x 1080 pixels in resolution.
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. Corollary: Don't buy a computer online unless you know for a fact 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 possible worlds, get a computer with a solid-state drive (SSD) for the system drive (the C: drive) plus a large hard drive for storage, perhaps attached via a USB cable. 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 = 1,073,741,824KB = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, or characters of storage) 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’ll 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. See Book 6, Chapter 1 to get started. For what it’s worth, I used Dropbox in every phase of writing this book.
Everything else they try to sell you pales in comparison.
Inside the big box
In this section, I give you just enough information about the inner workings of a desktop or laptop PC that you can figure out what you have to do with Windows 10. In the next section, I talk about touch-enabled tablets, the PCs that respond to touch. Details can change over time, but these are the basics.
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.
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/PRIME-X570-PRO/).
Courtesy of Dell Inc.
FIGURE 1-5: The enduring, traditional big box.
You find the following items attached to the motherboard:
The processor, or CPU: This gizmo does the main computing. It’s probably from Intel or AMD. Different manufacturers rate their processors in different ways, and it’s impossible to compare performance by just looking at the part number. Yes, Intel Core i7 CPUs usually run faster than Core i5s, and Core i3s are the slowest of the three, but there are many nuances. The same is true for AMD’s Ryzen 7, Ryzen 5, and Ryzen 3 line-up of processors. Unless you tackle intensive video games, create and edit audio or video files, or recalculate spreadsheets with the national debt, the CPU doesn’t count for much. If you’re streaming audio and video (say, with YouTube or Netflix) you don’t need a fancy processor. If in doubt, check out the reviews at www.tomshardware.com and www.anandtech.com.
Memory chips and places to put them: Memory is measured in megabytes (1MB = 1,024KB = 1,048,576 characters), gigabytes (1GB = 1,024MB), and terabytes (1TB = 1,024GB). Microsoft recommends a minimum of 2GB of RAM. Unless you have an exciting cornfield to watch grow while using Windows 10, aim for 4GB or more. Most computers allow you to add more memory to them. Boosting your computer’s memory to 8GB from 2GB makes the machine snappier, especially if you run memory hogs such as Microsoft Office, Photoshop, or Google Chrome. If you leave Outlook open and work with it all day and run almost any other major program at the same time, 8GB is a wise choice. If you’re going to do some video editing, gaming, or software development, you probably need more. But for most people, 8GB will run everything well.
Video card: Most motherboards include remarkably good built-in video. If you want more video oomph, you must buy a video card and put it in a card slot. Advanced motherboards have multiple PCI-Express card slots, to allow you to strap together two video cards and speed up video even more. If you want to run a VR or AR headset, such as an Oculus Rift, you’re going to need a much more capable video setup. For more information, see the “Screening” section in this chapter.
SSD: Solid-state drives, or SSDs, are fast and cheap storage. You don't have to buy an expensive drive to benefit from tangible speed improvements. If you don't want to wait a long time for your programs to load and don’t want Windows 10 to take minutes to boot, buying an SSD is a must. In comparison, hard disks (HDDs) are slow and dated. You should use an HDD for storing your personal files and backing up your data, not for running Windows 10, games, and apps.
Card slots (also known as
