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<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>I haven’t owned or used Apple products since my Apple II computer in the 80’s.  They were just too expensive and proprietary for my taste.  All my past employers were PC based so I came from DOS to Win7 during my 30+ years of employment.  I’ve repaired, upgraded, built and purchased countless PC’s for family, friends, neighbors, seniors, but for the last 10 years my computer of choice is the Chromebook.  It fulfills the computer needs of 95% of ‘my clientele’ with virtually no virus, malware, or update hassles for little cost.  Yet I still use PC’s and I’m not ready to give up on them.  I still love my Win7 PC and my older laserjet printers and have avoided Win8 and 10, but I’m concerned about being hampered using an obsolete browser.  </span>

<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>Here’s another option if you want to stick with PC’s and upgrade for minimal cost.  You can find refurbed Dell OptiPlex 7050 Micro Form Factor PC’s from 3rd party resellers (Walmart.com).  The system I found has:  Intel Core i5, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Windows 11 for $170 (and they included a USB Wi-Fi adapter)!  I purchased 2 of these and I’m amazed how well they work (they actually had Win11 Pro installed, even though they were spec’d with Home version).  They booted right into a ‘local’ account and contained absolutely NO crapware! </span>

I would think you’d still want a KVM switch when trouble-shooting a ‘customers’ desktop.

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Will Fastie

I’ve helped many friends, neighbors, relatives, and ‘customers’ over the years with Windows machines and I’m still an avid Windows user myself.  But I stopped at Win 7 and now highly recommend Chromebooks when helping out seniors.  They are MUCH less hassle than Windows and easily satisfy 95% of the folks that I assist.  I’m kind of surprised that Chromebooks weren’t queried in the survey.

Our small condo community is managed by a “Board”, made up of volunteer residents.  We use a generic Google email account as the primary source of record keeping.  All email correspondence includes this address and it’s also used as the “owner” of a Dropbox account that gets shared with the Board members.  Hopefully, it will be an easy ‘hand off’ when new members take over at some point!

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SupremeLaW

Tracey- In your article, you state: “But only the desktop has sufficient storage for the entire collection of images”. 600 meg was significant ten years ago, but 0.6 gig is not much by today’s standard. This would barely make a dent on a ten dollar 16 gig SD card. Maybe you meant 600 gig of images??

Sometimes your cache will also retain a ‘bad’ page and this tends to cause problems. I have found that simply deleting the cache will resolve some of these problems.