Training a new Prepress Person - what PC do you have?

[rickself]

The boss wants another person in Prepress. I have to buy a new PC and subscribe to Adobe, basically get it to a usable computer.
What PC do y'all have? Dell, HP? 1tb, i7…
I have to get it today or tomorrow to have online next week.
Not really the way I want to do it but this will help pave my way to retirement next year.
Thanks all!

[Joe]

Dell 10th gen i7 2.9 ghz 16 GB RAM minimum.

Dell 11th gen i7 3.8 ghz 32 GB RAM recommended.

Dell 11th gen i9 64 GB RAM Dreaming.

[rickself]

Thanks, Joe - I do assume you mean 16 or 32 GB, not MB!!

[pspdfppdfxhd]

We got a new one that is running very well.

It's a dell precision 5820 with a Xeon W-2133 @3.6GHz with 6 cores.

We have 32 GB of ram. We needed it to upgrade to run our Fiery XF 7 server.

[rickself]

Yikes - that's about $1000 over my allowance! But probably damn well worth it.

[Joe]

Thanks, Joe - I do assume you mean 16 or 32 GB, not MB!!

Yeah. I got one right!

Edit: Also fixed the original post.

[rickself]

What are thoughts on Mechanical Hard Drive vs SSD? I'm still old school and don't know how much about SSD.

[Joe]

Pros: SSD is a LOT faster. No moving parts. My 2013 iMac with an SSD boots up completely in under 15 seconds. Took about a minute and half before installing the SSD with a standard hard drive.

Cons: SSD cost is more expensive. 2 TB hard drive can be found for around $50-$60 while a 2 TB SSD will probably be around $200 - $220.

[rickself]

Some of the Dell desktops come with both. Pros/Cons?
I've been looking at minimum 8gb ram, 1tb HD, wired mouse and keyboard (I don't trust wireless).

[Joe]

Some of the Dell desktops come with both. Pros/Cons?
I've been looking at minimum 8gb ram, 1tb HD, wired mouse and keyboard (I don't trust wireless).

By both do you mean a hybrid drive that has both SSD and an old style HDD in one unit or do you mean two separate hard drives with one SSD hard drive and one old style hard drive?

With a hybrid drive you do get a performance increase as it keeps your most recently used files on the SSD portion of the drive. Pros: cheaper than a real SSD hard drive and performance is better than the old style hard drives. Cons: higher price than the old style hard drive and performance is less than the real SSD drive.

Two separate drives? Depends on the size of the SSD. If it is 256 GB that can hold the OS but probably not a lot of applications. You probably need a minimum of 500 GB SSD to install both OS and apps on. Pros: SSD usually contains the operating system so you do see a performance increase of the OS overall. Cons: You won't see a performance increase with the apps that are installed on old style hard drive (unless the SSD is large enough to install apps on).