Buying a computer
Buying the right computer that meets your needs not only for now, but the next 3-4 years, is an important decision. While you want to buy a powerful desktop/laptop, you probably want to know when the machine is too much for what you need it for. At the same time, you want to know what you are buying will allow to accomplish the tasks at hand as fast as possible.
Most of the literature out there may focus only one parameter, i.e., the Central Processing Unit (CPU) as being the main factor that affects speed. The CPU needs to be fast as it is the brains of the computer and needs to control all the communications between the different components of the computer, be it memory, hard drive, network cards (physical and Wi-Fi) peripherals such as USB connected devices and Bluetooth devices. While the CPU is the most important aspect that governs how fast the computer processes tasks, the amount of memory and memory speed, as well as disk speed can have a significant effect on the overall speed of the computer.
The way the computer works is that when you start up the computer, the CPU reads information from your disk storage, specifically the operating system such as Windows 10 or MacOS, and loads it into memory. Therefore, it is important that the disk is fast to allow fast reading of this information and loading into the memory, more often called RAM (Random Access Memory). The RAM generally can be 100 times faster than the Hard Disk Drive (HDD), also known as hard disk or hard drive, so it is the hard drive that can slow this process. Also important is the memory, but more in terms of how large this memory is. The memory is usually much smaller than the hard drive by 50 times or so, therefore the computer can only load a small portion of the hard drive contents into memory. The reason the computer loads information into memory is that it can communicate 100s of times faster with memory as compared to hard disk. The more information stored in the memory, the better it is so that the CPU can get the information quickly from the memory and execute the instructions, i.e., the operating system instructions as well as applications.
HP Laptop for Business use
This is an excellent HP laptop https://amzn.to/2HfhjJh with Intel Core i5-8250U Processor, 12 GB RAM and 500 SSD Drive and Windows 10. So plenty of power, memory and speed even if you are dealing with large documents, large spreadsheets and even doing graphics designs using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. if you are wanting to manipulate large graphics then consider a laptop with 24 GB - 32 GB RAM would be better.
The Intel Core i5-8250U Processor is an 8th Generation Intel® Core™ i5 Processors has 4 cores and 8 threads, meaning it can run 8 processes at the same time hence completing tasks much faster.
12 GB of RAM is great for most medium usage of applications. If you are a heavy user, i.e., use very demanding applications like very large Photoshop files, video processing etc, then considering a laptop with more RAM would be beneficial.
The SSD drive is excellent for fast processing of files, especially if you are working with large files.
