If you do buy a PC, check out the user reviews on Amazon and Best Buy. I’d definitely recommend buying a PC rather than the lowest-end Macs, because Apple makes a point of rendering its own slowest, cheapest machines obsolete. If you can afford a Mac, you should buy one. The preliminary section is mostly hardware stuff: computers, tablets, e-readers. If you have alternate recommendations, disagree with any of what follows, or have follow-up questions, let me know in the comments. It was time well-spent, but I want this page to serve as a shortcut. These are the programs that help you do trendy things like “social networking,” “blogging,” and “wasting time.” I’ve actually spent a mind-crushing number of hours digging through David Pogue’s reviews, CNET reviews, and user review sites to find good programs. Most of the time, they ask about the bewildering array of freeware and cheapware (if that’s even a word) that you can download and install. Sometimes people ask about getting set up: buying a new computer, buying accessories for it, and such.

(Thanks, workers enduring miserable conditions in China!)Įven so, I get asked a lot of technology questions. But the rest of the time, paying for somebody to fix your computer ends up costing nearly as much as buying a completely new machine. There are exceptions, of course: for example, sometimes you just have a faulty piece of RAM memory. If you have a computer problem, it’s often a hardware problem, and there’s usually nothing you can do. Legal challenges to BitTorrent, Napster, and Gnutella have actually helped steer inexperienced people away from software that hurt their machines. The system configurations work fine if you leave all the default settings in place, and they mostly work fine if you change the settings, too. The interfaces are reasonably simple, and suitable for beginners. Today, in 2012, most computers work pretty well most of the time. I don’t talk about Android apps or home movies because, tragically, I don’t have an Android device or a video camera. Photoshop), music studio apps, or other niche programs.

I don’t get into desktop publishing (e.g. Applications, social networking…literally everything I use is here.Ī few more rules: I never use the word “cloud,” because all it means is “on the Web.” I don’t get into the wide world of games I don’t even mention that one. Here’s the challenge I set for myself: a post answering the computer questions I get most often, covering everything a person would need to get “set up” (hardware & software).

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