DAVE FISHING wrote:
Son in law wants to buy me a new computer, for my birthday and retirement. Going to get back into taking more pictures and making videos. What computer and software do you guys recommend?
A. Never buy a toy computer. That is to say a Mac. They are under-powered, over priced, all parts are proprietary, mostly not upgradeable. And now are the new target for a lot of malware.
B. A Windows computer. Laptops are convenient and I use one, travel with it and love it, BUT for serious photo work it suffers from almost as much lack of capability as the Mac. Just the price is better. I have owned Acer, HP, Vaio, and a couple that are no longer around. My current laptop is a Dell with a quad-core processor and 8 gb of RAM and only 13.3 in. screen. Very lightweight. But I don't try to do any serious post processing on it.
C. For all my serious post processing, including some video, I have a desktop. It started life as an HP and still has that motherboard, but I have installed three hard drives, a fast video card, USB 3.0 16gb of RAM and a pen/tablet. The point is, with a desktop, you can upgrade things as you wish. You don't need three hard drives (Plus two external USB drives for backup) or the fast video card or even USB 3.0 (Though they will all come with the USB 3.0. I think that Dell is very good for us normal folk. I will no longer buy HP because of their abominable customer service (Carly Fiorina destroyed that company.). Other good brands are Acer and Asus. (Asus has always led the industry in the best motherboards, but in the last 15 years has been making great full computers.
One comment about HP. If you buy it from Costco, Costco provides their own technical support hotline, as well as their great return policies. You can also buy a good insurance policy for not much money.
Also, you can get great support from local independent computer businesses (Stay away from the "one-man-show" folk.) I just had a disaster. My hard drive with about 15 years of work on it died. No sweat, I have two backups. BUT the Acronis backup program broke. It was telling me that all was well and I had two good backups. But really it had lost key files on the backups and left my backups unreadable. My local heroes, North Bay Computer Systems, were able to recover everything for me at a reasonable fee.
I used to know a lot about this as a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, but that was long ago and the industry moves rapidly. Now I call North Bay Computer Services who can do all the things I no long know about.
I like to end with "Your Mileage May Vary." LOL