My Grandma and I have been shopping for a new desktop for my 86 year old great grandfather whose 5 year old Acer just died on him. He has a Chromebook but it can't play the Media Player reliant site he gets his news in Russian from so we're trying to find him a Windows tower. He already has everything else and we want at least 4GB RAM and at least 400 GB Hard Drive.

We found a couple PCs on Tiger Direct, and the only difference other than USB ports (which I don't care about) that I can see is the type of RAM listed. The Cheaper PC says PC3-6400 800MHz DDR2 and the Slightly more expensive one says PC3-8500 1066MHz DDR3. To me the difference seems negligible, he uses it for browsing, chain email sending, storing tons of family photos and videos, emailing, listening to radio broadcasts and podcasts, and obtaining a lot of mal/spy/adware.

What is the major difference here and is the RAM difference for a man whose main use of RAM is to run his computer even if there's a metric fuckton of malware on it?

 

I think the only relevant question here is 'are you likely to inherit it soon?' If yes, have them buy something better. Otherwise, fly on the cheap- retirees always appreciate frugality.

 

It doesn't matter, just buy the cheaper one.

 

I'm not paying for it and if I inherit it (hopefully still at least a few years off) we'd have to spend at least 400 more to beat out my pc probably so what we're buying him doesn't even fall in the same species as mine at this point.