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Minimum Spec For A Usable Windows Machine 
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One of my clients requires new computers. Up to now they have had a mixture of Macs and Windows machines, but they are now considering moving to an all Windows environment.

As you may know from some of my other posts I know pretty much nothing about the the current state of Windows software and hardware. Their needs are IMO very low key: Email (from an exchange server) web browsing, and very basic Office (mostly Word) so AFAICS they don't need to anything massively powerful; and up until now they have been managing perfectly well with what is now 8 year old hardware, but it has finally come to the end of its useful working life.

I expect whatever I suggest next will need to last at least 5 years before they will next consider replacing them so that does have to be taken into account.

I would like this time to switch to a single OS, and the current Windows users are a little nervous if that means Mac OS, rather than what they are familiar with, but considering that they are still on Windows XP, it seems to me that the jump to Windows 10 is going to be almost as alien?

So what spec do I need to be looking at for Windows desktops, laptops and perhaps tablets too? These are all client machines - I don't need to consider any servers.

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Wed Jan 04, 2017 9:25 am
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There is the old adage that no one got fired buying Dell

Having said that something like this as the main desk top would do

http://www.dell.com/uk/business/p/inspiron-3650-desktop/pd?3x_nav=PROC_BRAND%3DCORE_I5_6&3x_page=1&filterCollapsed=true&ref=PD_OC


For Laptops it’s a bit harder as you can go from anything that is not that portable right up to a “sexy” Ultrabook – generally you are paying for weight (or lack of) and screen resolution
But anything with the I5 chip or above will do the next few years easily (and later you could swap the HDD’s out with SSD’s as a mind life refresh giving a big speed boost)


Also will someone like Dell they would be able to buy any level of support they wanted (via you)
I am sure you could find similar specs elsewhere slightly cheaper if you hunt around

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Wed Jan 04, 2017 10:36 am
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Thanks!

Can I get away with 8GB RAM? (I'm going to have to watch pretty much every Pound that is spent on this)

Also AFAICS the only way to get Outlook these days is to have an Office 365 Subscription? I had a look at their Exchange hosting but it doesn't come with any free copies of Outlook.

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Wed Jan 04, 2017 12:06 pm
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I was gonna suggest an I5 chip and 8Gb RAM too, in fact this generation of machines is probably about to get cheaper as Intel just announced their update of the current chips.

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Wed Jan 04, 2017 12:10 pm
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BigRedX wrote:
Thanks!

Can I get away with 8GB RAM? (I'm going to have to watch pretty much every Pound that is spent on this)

Also AFAICS the only way to get Outlook these days is to have an Office 365 Subscription? I had a look at their Exchange hosting but it doesn't come with any free copies of Outlook.


Yes 8GB is fine - you only need more if you are doing more intensive things (these days the main bottleneck is the HDD esp if they fit slower 5400 rpm ones)

Cant comment on outlook

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OK, so all we need to do is find a half African, half Chinese, half Asian, gay, one eyed, wheelchair bound dwarf with tourettes and a lisp, and a st st stutter and we could make the best panel show ever.


Wed Jan 04, 2017 12:25 pm
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Thanks!

What about anti-virus software? What is recommended these days? Are any of the free ones any good? Are any of the paid for ones?

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Wed Jan 04, 2017 1:20 pm
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BigRedX wrote:
Thanks!

What about anti-virus software? What is recommended these days? Are any of the free ones any good? Are any of the paid for ones?


Avoid AVG (they've been up to no good, in short), Avast Free is very good but occasionally throws up false positives and needs to be checked carefully on installation. Free has occasional pop-ups to get you to buy. Dunno about the paid for version.

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Wed Jan 04, 2017 2:20 pm
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I use Avast at home but if it was for a company I would go to the paid version / a.n. other mainstream provider

http://www.techradar.com/news/top-10-best-antivirus-software-for-2016 should point you in the right direction

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John_Vella wrote:
OK, so all we need to do is find a half African, half Chinese, half Asian, gay, one eyed, wheelchair bound dwarf with tourettes and a lisp, and a st st stutter and we could make the best panel show ever.


Wed Jan 04, 2017 2:46 pm
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I wouldn't necessarily rule out the Core i3 given the usage scenarios given. There's not much there that will see a massive benefit from having 4 (physical) cores. The i3s have higher clock speeds and also lower power consumption generally speaking than the i5s.

The top of the range i3 (Skylake) runs at 3.9 GHz on both of its dual hyperthreaded cores. Getting similar speed from an i5 (turbo boost frequency, not over all cores) will set you back nearly £80 more (prices from Scan and that's if you were buying the CPUs - the difference may be less if your are buying prebuilt from Dell or similar).

8GB of RAM should be plenty as has already been stated, although it's worth checking how it's fitted (single or dual channel). Single channel will result in a small performance penalty but may actually give you room for future upgrades without having to throw out the existing memory - the motherboard in a low end system may only have 2 DIMM slots, especially if it's based on one of the smaller motherboard form factors.

Also worth considering how they handle file storage. If stuff will generally be held on the server or the cloud you could spec a small ssd instead of a hdd and the machines will feel much more responsive in day to day use.

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Wed Jan 04, 2017 7:10 pm
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Our IT provider gets us Office 2016 licences - i.e. without subscribing to Office 365 - for around a £180 one-off fee. You don't need to subscribe if you don't want to - although there are advantages if your staff work remotely or want cloud backup services which come with Office 365.

For hardware, I'd agree with the above advice - the last 4 PCs we've bought have also been Dell and no major issues so far in the last year, apart from the usual Windows niggles but that's to be expected. 8Gb RAM should be fine, but if you can stretch to 16Gb then it will future-proof it a bit. Quad Core i5 should also be your starting point - if budget allows, Core i7 would be money well spent but for general tasks the Core i5 is good.

Dell do some nice All-in-One PCs, which come with a nice quality built-in display. Not quite up to an iMac level, but the build quality is good and the stand is solid and sturdy, plus adjustable for height as well as angle - even portrait mode. I've been nicely surprised by these PCs.

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Wed Jan 04, 2017 7:27 pm
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pcernie wrote:
Avoid AVG (they've been up to no good, in short)

Could you please elaborate - via PM if you're worried about saying it in a public forum! We're used AVG for years, and I'm thinking about switching to another solution, AVG seems to be slow and unreliable nowadays, but not aware of any other dodgy activities they've been up to.

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Wed Jan 04, 2017 7:32 pm
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Thanks everyone. I think I'm just about sorted now for what I'm going to recommend.

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Thu Jan 05, 2017 9:12 am
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steve74 wrote:
pcernie wrote:
Avoid AVG (they've been up to no good, in short)

Could you please elaborate - via PM if you're worried about saying it in a public forum! We're used AVG for years, and I'm thinking about switching to another solution, AVG seems to be slow and unreliable nowadays, but not aware of any other dodgy activities they've been up to.


They were collecting and selling data to advertisers (I assume they still are)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/14 ... _analysis/

And that's when they weren't redirecting your search via a toolbar so they could earn ad revenue through Google (small tickbox on installation was the only thing stopping it, apparently). It was all enough to stop me using it about a year ago.

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Thu Jan 05, 2017 9:34 am
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BigRedX wrote:
Thanks everyone. I think I'm just about sorted now for what I'm going to recommend.


Drop me a message if you need a hand with this.

I work for an MSP so this sort of thing is what we do on a day to day basis. Things like Office version etc is dependant on what version of Exchange etc you're using

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Thu Jan 05, 2017 10:20 am
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hifidelity2 wrote:
There is the old adage that no one got fired buying Dell

Erm, that was for IBM! The saying predates Dell by a couple of decades!

I agree with the rest, I wouldn't really buy anything without an SSD these days. For basic office, Core i3 will do, but if it is for 5 years or more then I would say i5. Memory, I wouldn't go below 8GB these days.

BigRedX wrote:
Also AFAICS the only way to get Outlook these days is to have an Office 365 Subscription?

Or Office 2016. But Office 365 offers more bang for the buck, unless they already have an Exchange server and is less hassle to set up and manage (the ops side is done for you).

I use the standard Windows Defender in Windows 10 at home. At work we use Trend Micro.

Depending on how many PCs we are talking about, a managed AV solution, like Trend Micro or GData for business can save a lot of hassle.

Likewise, if there are a lot of PCs and a server, it is worth putting WSUS on the server to manage the updates for the domain (it downloads all of the updates once and you select which ones to distribute to which PCs - you can push all updates to a test machine, for example, and once they have been tested, push them to the rest of the fleet.

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Mon Jan 09, 2017 4:06 pm
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