The Village Voice Oct Nov 2018

WHEN IS CHEAP TOO CHEAP?
It quite often happens that in the space of a
short while, the same issue rears its head
from a number of sources. In this case it was
whether buying a cheap computer because
of anticipated light usage is a good idea. As
so often in the tech arena, the first answer is
a resounding, ‘it depends’. However, when it
comes to cheap computers, there is a
baseline under which it is simply not wise to
go.
There are laptop computers currently being
sold with 20-30Gb SSD hard drives. Now I
can’t remember when I last used a computer
with a hard drive that size, but I suspect it
may have been around the turn of the
century, and it seemed a very large hard
drive at the time.
It gets worse. Windows 10 regularly updates
to add new features or fix security holes that
have been discovered. To do that, it
downloads the updates to your computer
before it installs the new files. If you don’t
have enough space to fit the update files
onto your computer hard drive, the update
will fail, and short of having someone put a
larger hard drive in the computer, there’s
little you can do.
I would suggest that 128Gb is the smallest
hard drive you should contemplate, coupled
with 8Gb main memory if possible. It may be
way more than you need, but experience
tells me that’s really the best place to start if
you want to keep using the computer for any
length of time.
Today a large hard drive is measured in
Terabytes. Just putting that in perspective,
you would need around fifty-one 20Gb hard
drives to store one terabyte of data. 20Gb is
a very small hard drive by today’s standards.
‘Ah’, you may say, ‘I only do a bit of Internet
searching and emails, I don’t need a very high
specification computer’. That’s true, if you
don’t make a habit of storing digital photos
or video, you don’t need a very large hard
drive.
When I tell you that according to Microsoft
themselves, 64-bit Windows 10 requires
20Gb of free space on its own, that’s all or
most of your hard drive gone right there. The
trouble then comes that if you want to use
an alternative browser such as Chrome, or
use Microsoft Office, or any other program,
there’s no space left.
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