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He unboxed the computer and it was a refurbished Dell workstation... 2nd gen i7 2600. He was excited as hell at first until we tried to install Premiere Pro. The processor wasn't supported. I found an old compatible version of Premiere and let him play around with it for a while and soon enough he was asking for help.

I have to say Amazon resellers do a terrific job at misleading specs for aspring enthusiasts - "Intel i7, 2TB storage, 16gb ram". We had a discussion of DDR generations, PCIE speeds from 2011, processor generations (thanks to some helpful links and vids from you guys), and spinning platter hard drives vs M.2 capability.

It became pretty apparent the Dell was about as useful as a Chromebook. After he realized it wasn't worth upgrading I offered to piece together a new rig. Had him work for chores and offered to match his savings dollar to dollar.. he ended up saving around $800 so we had about $1600 to work with.

Best part of the experience was shopping for parts and teaching him how to find deals thanks to Slickdeals and r/buildapcsales. Almost every part we purchased was on sale in some form. Through that process he learned a ton about specs, speeds, brands, compatibility, etc. The shopping experience ended up teaching him as much about computers vs the building experience.

The rig shreds and it was overall enlightening to compare a 2nd gen vs 12th gen i7 side by side:

Pic 1

Pic 2

i7 12700K

Asrock Riptide WiFi Z790

64gb GSKILL Trident 6400

XFX Speedster RX6800

Seasonic Focus GX-750 PSU

Jonsbo D41 Mesh case with LCD

1tb Kingston M.2

1tb Western Digital WD_BLACK M.2

Arctic Liquid Freezer iii 360 AIO

5x Antec 120mm RGB fans