Lowest Computer Specifications [Productivity Based]

[Maisaan]

First of all hi, and let me explain why I am here,

 

Short story : To find the lowest recommended specifications for a computer that will be used for productivity (i.e. update excel sheets)

 

Long story : For the past (almost) two years me and my colleagues have been requesting for an upgrade on our computer systems, our reason for doing so:

• Most of our computers freeze for about 2-3 seconds for every cell we update on the sheet.
• We cannot have more than one spreadsheet open without encountering crashes.
• If a power outage occurs then some of our computers will not even boot properly while those that do, take at least 10-30 mins to boot-up and lets not forget the time it takes for all the startup programs to settle.

 

The current overall specs that stands out to me:

• DDR3 1400Mhz (4GB)
• Intel i5 4570
• HDD (Maybe 100 - 200GB since most of our stuff is on our servers we don't pay much attention to this, however it maybe important to note that they are always over 90% full on all computers)
• GPU - NVIDIA GeForce card used for dual monitors.
• Monitors : Resolution 1366*768

 

I have attempted to find some baselines or references, however since i am unable to find any reliable ones (mostly because no website says the same thing) i turn to you guys.

 

[Cereal5]

Your problem most likely lies in your HDD. If they are old and cluttered, they can become very slow (same with old windows installations). Also, I'm not sure how much RAM excel uses, but that's probably where your freezes are coming from, since windows alone needs like 2-3GB just to run. Any current gen i3 or Ryzen 3 CPU is plenty for your needs. Even a pentium or Athlon would probably be fine, though others can chip in on that.

[GoldenLag]

get a r3 2200G with 8-16GB of Ram and SSD storage. that should solve most if not all the issues

[zombieshy_guy81]

Your problem is probably the amount of HDD space you have, try throwing in a second higher capacity HDD or SSD, also check your ram and GPU usage in task manager and reply back how much is being used while a spreadsheet is open. And i don't think this is a CPU related issue as far as i know the i5 4570 is still a pretty capable Cpu so it might be a server or network issue if its not the Hdd?

[LogicalDrm]

Excel isn't (I haven't used latest version with heavy data) optimized for multiple cores. It eats RAM, so 4gb and stuff running on background is not going to cut it. Otherwise you can run dual monitors on iGPU with suitable motherboard. You don't need GPU for that. If you need to do some sort of image manipulation or image rendering, then you need something.

[Happycowdance]

upgrade your ram to 8gs and get an ssd boot drive and 1tb hdd

should be less than 150 in upgrades

[Maisaan]

Hey guys, thank you for all the help, I wish to clarify a few things, I have read all of your comments and i agree that the issue is mainly with the ram and HDD, at the moment i am unable to get you any specific information as to which version of office its running but i will do so tomorrow. We are running windows 10 with office 2016.

 

Although i am extremely grateful for your help and support i would like to clarify that my purpose here is to find the most recommended lowest specification for a computer that will do productivity work. This information may or may not be used to procure new systems by the company.

 

It is easy to find the best specs for gaming computers but not so much for these kind of things. From the minor tests that i could conduct (as i do not have admin privileges) it is somewhat evident that the bottle neck is caused by the RAM and HDD mostly. So my current lowest recommended specs are as followed:

 

CPU : Intel i5 3Ghz Dual Core and above

GPU : Any NVIDIA GeForce since its sole purpose is for dual monitor support

HDD : 250GB minimum

RAM : DDR3 1600Mhz (if not DDR4) 8GB

 

And if you guys could also suggest an benchmarks that do not require admin access that would be great too. Thank you.