MBA1116 How to Upgrade Your Computer for Less

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Hey O welcome to the Hundred Dollars MBA show, the business podcast that saves you time, money and headaches while building your business every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode you will learn how to upgrade your computer for less. In today's modern business world, your computer is the backbone of your business, especially if you're running an online business. We aired an episode a couple months ago about when to upgrade your computer. It got a lot of buzz and a lot of interest, but we wanted to expand on it. What if you want to upgrade your computer but you just don't have a lot of cash lying around? You just can't afford to drop $3,000 on an all new MacBook Pro. So what is the alternative? How can you improve the quality of your computer so you're working faster, smarter and more efficiently without breaking the bank? I'm going to show you how in today's episode. My goal today is to show you ways to computer for just a few hundred dollars or less. These were my go to moves, especially when I first started out in business because hey, I didn't want to spend a whole lot of money upgrading my computer every few years. When I applied these techniques, spending just a few hundred dollars and sometimes even less got me a computer that was about 80% of what I would expect if I got a whole new computer. Let me show you how in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. A slow, sluggish, and underperforming computer can be the bane of your existence. When you're working on your business every single day, you simply can't afford wasting your time with a computer that's just not doing what it's supposed to do. Whether you're using your computer to do things on the web like, you know, create your website, compose email, or you're editing videos or recording podcasts, your computer is not supposed to hold you back from getting things done. It's supposed to help you do it. So today, I'm going to share with you a few tips on how to improve your computer right now for under a few hundred dollars. This is an alternative to buying a whole new computer to upgrade your computer by buying a new one. I'm going to start with the most least expensive solution, and sometimes it will do the trick with just this solution, and that's buying a piece of software called CleanMyMac or CleanMyPC. This is a fantastic investment. It's a great piece of software. If you have a Mac, it's called cleanmymac. If you have a PC, it's called cleanmypc. Now, what it does, it cleans out your computer of all the junk files that are just, you know, slowing down your computer, Things that you don't see, things that are not real documents. These are cache files that are being saved. When you browse the web, sometimes it could be up to a gig of these files at any given time. But it also tells you what is actually holding your computer back, what is taking so much of your memory and your computing power. It tells you which applications that are kind of bloating your system. What are the large files on your computer that are kind of slowing things down. And it makes you aware of what's going on, why your computer is acting this way. So cleaning out all the junk and also identifying what's slowing down your computer is a huge, huge advantage. Knowing what's wrong will allow you to take action. Now, for most of us, it's just that our computer is just overloaded. We have too many files. We may have applications that are really heavy. So I first recommend deleting any applications you're not using. If you haven't used an application for over a year, you're not using it, get rid of it. Applications can be quite heavy, especially things like Adobe After Effects or Photoshop. That's all been moved to the cloud thanks to Adobe cc. But if you're not using any kind of app for over a year, delete it and clean my Mac. CleanMyPC makes it super simple. You're also gonna be aware of the largest files on your computer. Now, this is where tip two comes in. Grab yourself a hard drive, an external hard drive that you can plug in via usb. If you go on Amazon, you can get a portable external hard drive, which is about the size of, let's say a sandwich or maybe your phone. So it's super portable. You can put it in your bag. You can get a two terabyte hard drive for like 50 bucks on Amazon. Most of our computers don't even have that kind of memory on it. If you have a crazy, you know, fully featured computer, it's going to have a terabyte in it. Not even two. My MacBook has 125 gigabytes. It's not even a quarter of a terabyte. So by getting a hard drive, you can move all your large files off your computer onto your hard drive. The first thing you want to do is remove anything on your desktop. Create a folder called Desktop, and maybe.

You want to date it.

Dump everything that's on the desktop into this folder and drag it to this hard drive. Every time you open your computer, turn it on, load it up. Anything on your desktop is going to have to load. It's going to slow things down. So make sure your desktop is clean and then again clean. My Mac is going to tell you what files are quite large, copy them and then paste them or move them over to your hard drive and then get rid of them off your computer once they're saved on your hard drive. Now, if you want to be super, super safe, you can have a backup of your backup hard drive of this hard drive that you just bought in the cloud. Amazon's great for this. Amazon Web Services, they have something called a deep freeze storage. This means this is a storage that you can kind of store in Amazon and not really access that often. And it's super cheap. A couple terabytes will cost you around $10 a year. So, so cheap. So that way you have a backup of your hard drive. Just in case something happens at a hard drive, you have a backup of it in the cloud doing These two things alone can really greatly improve your computer. I just recently did this with my computer, my MacBook Pro, and it really helps your computer just speed up and be back to normal. Now, if your computer's significantly old, let's say three, four, five years old, cleaning it up is just not going to be enough. You're going to have to increase the ram. RAM is basically your flash memory, which means the more RAM you have, the more computing power you can do with your processor. The more programs you can have open at the same time, the faster your machine's going to work. Now, when you bought your computer and you had a spec sheet, you would see memory and it would probably see something like 4 gigabytes, 8 gigabytes of memory or RAM. You can also find this out by going to the Apple icon on the top left hand corner on a Mac and choosing about this Mac and it will say all the information about your Mac. Mine, for example, is 8 gigabytes. You can take your laptop to a computer center or a computer refurbishing store or the Mac store if you have an Apple and upgrade your RAM. You can take it from 8 to 12 if you want, or some people go to 16, doubling the RAM, and it's going to make a huge difference. Now, this is going to cost you about a couple hundred dollars if you're on a PC, a bit more if you're on a Mac. But this is what's going to make a huge, significant bit difference. It's probably going to feel like having a brand new computer. I've done this a few times with my computers and I basically was able to delay buying a new computer by a couple of years. For the most part, computers these days are so well built and the technology is so well done. By just doing this simple hack, increasing your ram, it's going to really significantly improve the performance. Most of our laptops, the monitors are fine, they last a super long time, our keyboards are fine, and even the processor, you know, the processing chip. We've gone to the point where really we don't need that much more computing power. Most of our work is done via the web. So I love just doing this hack to save you some money and maybe just buy you some time before you can upgrade that computer and maybe take that money that you were going to buy a new computer with and invest it into your business.

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All right, I want to give you one more tip when it comes to improving your computer without really shelling out a whole lot of cash on a new one. And this is probably the most expensive option out of them. But you probably can do this for a few hundred dollars, maybe max five hundred dollars, and that's buying a used or refurbished computer. Now the computer might be around, let's say $800, but you probably can trade in your computer to the actual store in exchange, or you can sell it on Craigslist or on the classified ads in your local area. Now this refurbished or used computer can cost around $800, but you can sell or trade in your computer so you'll be around 500 do. Now I recommend getting a refurbished computer from an actual retail store or an actual manufacturer like Dell or Apple or I should say an Apple authorized store because Apple the actual store doesn't actually sell used computers. But what I'm trying to say is if you go to an actual certified store, they'll come with a warranty. These computers will come with a warranty, so at least you're good to go for a year or two. Now these People, they reformat everything, they clean everything out and they might even upgrade the computer for you so they can sell it. And even if they don't, you can probably strike a deal if you say, hey, can you upgrade the RAM on this computer so it can last even longer for me? And they can maybe do some sort of bundle deal with an upgrade along with, you know, purchasing the computer. There are lots of people that sell their computer as soon as the latest model comes out. So this laptop or computer could be, you know, a year old or maybe 2 years old. And it's absolutely fine, it's looking great, it's working great, and you can get a great deal on a secondhand or refurbished computer. Now, there is a difference between refurbished and used. I actually prefer refurbished because again, it's coming from the actual manufacturer. And when they refurbish something, most manufacturers, let's say for example, I get a refurbished Dell computer if something was wrong and somebody sent back their computer and they just gave them a new computer, they don't just throw out that computer that they gave them. There was something wrong with the monitor or there was something wrong with the, let's say the motherboard or the graphics card. They just replace that actual graphics card or part with a brand new one and they call it refurbished. So that computer is partly new and it's been tested and you know, the manufacturer probably will honor the warranty with that refurbishment. So that's definitely an option. Now having said that, I do want to stress that a well oiled machine, your computer is really important to the productivity of your day. If you're wasting any time during your day, every day on a slow computer, that's a lot of time and obviously money wasted. So improving the performance of your computer is a huge investment in your business and in your productivity. So do it. If you're struggling, make it a priority. That's kind of my rule of thumb. It's like my number one tool every day when I work, so it's gotta be amazing. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 MBA show that wraps up today's episode. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. The more you can work on the web, meaning you're using a browser or using cloud based software, the better. The less you need to depend on the computing power of your machine. The more you have to rely on heavy tools or software that's installed on your computer, the more powerful your computer has to be. For example, if you use Google Docs and sheets instead of Word and Excel that's installed on your computer, it's just going to be less headaches and obviously it's just happening in your browser, it's saved in the cloud, and it's using a whole lot less computing power. So keep that in mind if you want to switch over to more cloud based softwares. It's going to demand less on your computer. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 MBA show. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Freeride Friday. I'll check you then. Take care. Of.

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