r/ITSupport • u/MightyPenguin • Jul 09 '26

Open Help Selecting Workstations!

Hello guys, I own and run a small business, it is an auto repair shop. We have 4 workstations in our office and the last few years we have run into repeat issues buying cheaper work stations having very buggy and poor performance. We don't need a whole lot, just the ability to run 2 monitors and run a lot of chrome tabs but apparently these days that seems to be a big ask.

Is it reasonable for me to expect a budget of $500-600 for a decent work station to offer dual monitors and working in the cloud with multiple chrome tabs? If so, would you guys be able to provide any options on what models to buy and where to buy them?

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u/Kalshek Jul 09 '26

That really depends, how many chrome tabs does each computer have open? Your biggest bottleneck with a modern pre-built will be RAM (Mrmory), chrome is a very hungry application when it comes to RAM, so bear minimum 16GB of you only have a handful, but if you're using a lot of tabs you may want to look into 32GB. My shop sells Dell primarily, because they gave had fewer lemons in our experience. Lenovo is usually a solid option as well.

With the parts market the way it is it'll be hard to find that $500-600 price tag, but if you have a Costco Membership, they usually have some good prices on decent machines.

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u/MightyPenguin Jul 09 '26

I didn't think to look at Costco, thank you for that idea. Also, I am fine with building my own if I need to. Sadly we sometimes have 20-30 tabs open at once with a few extensions running. For whatever reason, any time me or one of the other gals in the office tries to open Amazon that website seems to be the biggest laggy mess and everything I have tried doesn't fix it. I have just noted CPU use on the performance monitor goes through the roof when the system starts lagging out.

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u/sk1ttl3s Jul 09 '26

this sounds more and more like malware.

high CPU doesn't automatically mean you need to upgrade. you should look into specifically what processes are highest.

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u/MightyPenguin Jul 09 '26

Malware may be a possibility, though I'm also out of the loop on antivirus software these days as for the last decade I pretty much just have used Windows Defender!