- #Upgrade office home and student movie
- #Upgrade office home and student update
- #Upgrade office home and student upgrade
- #Upgrade office home and student pro
- #Upgrade office home and student windows 8.1
A Western Digital WD Elements drive (about £80) should be fine. At the moment, 3TB drives are reliable and the best value, and USB 3 is faster than USB 2 for transferring files. If you don't have a backup copy of the data on your Windows XP machine, then you should buy an external hard drive as soon as possible. Of course, if speed is important, you could buy the Lenovo H530s with a faster Core i5-4440 or Core i7-4770 instead. This has the same TDP (Thermal Design Power) rating – 37 Watts – as the Core-i3 in the Lenovo desktop, so in this case, the laptop would be faster than the desktop. Not all the adverts are specific about the processor, so check that it has a 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-4200M. If you decide to go for a laptop then the HP ProBook 450 G1 E9Y55EA is a good choice.
#Upgrade office home and student upgrade
This also means you upgrade to Windows 8 later: you've already paid for it.
#Upgrade office home and student pro
Business versions of Windows come with "downgrade rights" so you can buy Windows 8 Pro but have Windows 7 installed. If you want a Windows 7 machine, then shop in the business sections of the HP and Dell websites, or try a local supplier such as Chillblast. Having said that, it's a much smaller jump from Windows XP to Windows 7 than it is to Windows 8, and Windows 7 is what I recommend to business users, as distinct from consumers.
#Upgrade office home and student windows 8.1
If you're open minded, you can easily learn to use Windows 8.1 in a couple of hours.
#Upgrade office home and student update
Also, Microsoft has made numerous changes with Windows 8.1 Update 1 that make it much more amenable to desktop PC users. It runs Windows 8 instead of Windows 7, but you can set it to boot straight to the desktop for a more XP-like experience. Last week, I suggested the Lenovo H530s with a Core i3-4130 processor, 6GB of memory and a 1TB hard drive, which is available from PC World for £349.99. I answered a question about buying a Dell or HP desktop in November ( Which PC should I buy to run a small business?). If you decide to go for a desktop PC, there are plenty of good options from Dell, HP, and Lenovo, who are the main suppliers in the business market. Hardware choiceĪs you have noticed, I've answered several questions about choosing Windows hardware recently (and – sorry – left many more emails unanswered), so I won't go through it again. Even small tower systems also have more room for expansion – extra memory and hard drives etc – and they are much easier to repair. Desktops can use processors that run much hotter because they're much easier to cool. Laptop manufacturers therefore tend to fit processors that don't use much power, because they generate less heat, and batteries last longer. The problem with computing is that faster always means hotter, but laptops are cramped for space and hard to cool. They usually have faster processors, they last longer, and they are much easier to upgrade and/or repair. Third, desktop PCs are better value than laptops. However, this increases the cost, and means you won't recover all the space used by your current desktop. You can put a laptop on a riser and use it with a separate monitor and a more ergonomic keyboard. I wrote about this in detail last year in How can I use laptops and tablets without suffering from physical pains? Second, a desktop PC has better ergonomics and is much better for your health than using a laptop. However, it's still better to have more physical screen area. Of course, you can buy laptops with high-resolution screens, and with bigger screens.
#Upgrade office home and student movie
You will be able to see many more rows and columns in Excel, and more lines of text in Word, or use the space to show two programs at once.įor movie buffs, it means a leap from standard HD (high definition) or 720p video to Full HD or 1080p video. This will show twice as much information. With a desktop PC, you could buy a 21-23in screen with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. Mainstream laptops like the HP ProBook have 15.6in screens with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. First, you will be able to use a bigger screen, which means you will be more productive. I assume your current PC is a desktop, in which case, I'd recommend another desktop. Budget for your next PC to run until early 2020, when Microsoft will stop supporting Windows 7. If you bought your current PC in 2003 then it has done well to last this long, though you may be surprised how slow it is compared to a modern machine.