Determine what you will be doing with it. (Writing/Documents, photo/video editing, databases, programming, music composition, social media, etc...)
Research what software you will need to do all that. You will find both Linux and Windows options for almost everything.
Check the software for what operating system, hardware (RAM and CPU) is required to run it.
Determine what computer hardware runs that operating system.
Look for features that will speed up your computer such as more RAM, solid state drives, faster CPU. Try to avoid Celeron.
Buy the most powerful computer you can afford.
There are two items in your computer that have moving parts. Cooling fans and disk drives. These two parts cause the most trouble because of the moving parts they are the most susceptible to failure.
The question is not if these will fail, but when.
When cooling fans fail, overheating causes disks, the CPU, and/or power supply in desktops to start failing and disturbs the connection of the memory chips due to the higher temperature expanding everything. The remedy is to dust inside the PC, replace the fans, and possibly the CPU or power supply, if affected, then re-seat the memory chips. (This is an educated guess from experience, your experience may vary)
To help your fans last longer, at least once a year, blow the dust out of the fans and off all internal components with a can of air or an air compressor. More often in dusty environments.
For desktops and towers, It is best if you remove the cover to dust.
For laptops and all-in-ones, you must be very careful if removing the cover, there are little plastic clips that break very easily. Instead of removing the cover, try to blow air in all the vents until dust stops coming out. Be cautious, industrial air power could harm the system by unplugging wires inside and breaking parts. No tornado winds allowed.
To catch fan failure before it causes damage, run a hardware monitor program.
The Open Hardware Monitor is a free open source software that monitors temperature sensors, fan speeds, voltages, load and clock speeds of a computer.
When disk drives fail, the result is either file corruption, boot failure, or both. The remedy is to replace the disk. You may or may not be able to recover your files so do backups. Sometimes file corruption is caused by overheating and can be repaired once cooling is fixed.
To help disks last longer, at least once a year, blow the dust out of the fans and off all internal components. Also run a hardware monitor program to watch the temperature.
The newer SSD (Solid State Drive) have no moving parts so they should last longer but are still adversely affected by overheating.
Send an email or text to Doug to get pricing if you would rather have a tech (me) do the maintenance and or install the monitor program. Maintenance could also include file system optimization, plus security and OS updates depending on your request.
Clear your browser cache. Warning, this may remove some autofill information.
Clean out your old browser bookmarks.
Clean out your downloads folder.
Clean out your email, especially for email programs that download and keep emails locally. Also a good idea for online accounts.
Run an anti-virus scan. Search the internet for good anti-virus options. Avoid the big names, they are now expensive bloatware.
Run the disk defragmenter. Search the internet for "how do I run defrag on Windows 11".
Accept all security and bug fix updates from the update utility program.
Moving from Microsoft Office to the free Libre Office Suite is easy to do.
WARNING: The Libre Office official/native format is Open Document Text (*.odt). To work with *.doc or *.docx MS Office formatted files, Libre Office will open them and edit them, however, after about 10 to 20 saves, the file will corrupt. So, to avoid corruption, open the file, save as *.odt, keep this as your master file. When you need to share with MS Office users, finish your edits in *.odt, then 'save a copy' as MS *.doc or *.docx. Then you can share that copy with MS Office users. MS Office can open *.odt files but MS purposely does not make it easy to work with open document standard files even though the standard is open to all.
This is good and bad.
Good:
If your computer is stolen, your files are protected. Unless they also have your 48 digit file recovery key or your Microsoft account password.
Bad:
1. If your system crashes and you don't know your recovery key, you or your tech support person will not be able to recover your files.
2. Your files are unencrypted when you open them for editing/sharing/emailing/viewing etc... which slows down the process.
3. If you have figured out how to make your login account local instead of logging in through Microsoft as I have done. There is no way to find your recovery key.
4. If someone else installed Windows on your PC using their Microsoft account, the encryption key will show up in their online Microsoft account.
Take action:
1. To check if your files are encrypted; go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Device Encryption. On that page you will see if encryption is enabled (On).
2. If you don't know your recovery key, click on the "Find your BitLocker recovery key" link which will take you to instructions for viewing it in your online microsoft account. Print that microsoft page or write the key down and keep it somewhere away from the computer.
3. Or, you can disable encryption and forget about the recovery key. If you disable encryption, do not shut down the PC until it is finished unencrypting your files. Unencryption can take from 1 to 10+ hours depending on the number of files and speed of your PC. You can still work while it is unencrypting in the background.
4. Or, you can switch to Linux which is free, has local login accounts, optional encryption, and free software (they do accept donations).
This is another good reason to backup your files.
If you want help with any of the actions/solutions, email or text me.