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| Lot of good advice above, I'll add my 2 cents. I bought my daughter a new Dell for Christmas. If you have to get Vista, get the premium or ultimate, what ever is the top end, just seem to have fewer problems that way. Personally I just bought a new Dell laptop and the local computer man put Windows 7 on it. Few things different than Vista, couple of bugs, but nothing major. I probably would not do that for her going to a University. They will probably have to take it and put their own anti virus and security on it and might pitch a fit with Windows 7 because it's a beta version. Last I heard Windows 7 was coming late summer, at least that is when the beta version is set to run out.
Nothing bigger than a 15 inch screen if she is going to take it to class.
Get an extra power cord adapter so she can keep one in the back pack and have one plugged in at her desk and not have to worry about grabbing it when she heads out the door and running the cord all around when she comes back.
The one thing I would really want to do is get the very best screen you can, I believe Dell calls it true life or something like that. It varies with the level of computer. My Daughters machine was in the $1100 range and a few steps above the one I got that I spent $700 including all of the Windows office programs, anti virus and spyware already in stalled and working. The detail on her screen is fantastic. She uses it to watch dvd's if she has any spare time or wants to relax.
If she's comptent with a touch pad mouse that's great, if not having a bluetooth in the laptop will allow her to use a bluetooth mouse and not have to have a stick plugged into the usb all the time. Handy to just take it out and use it for a class and put it back in the backpack. Myself I have to have my trusty mouse, touchpads and my fat fingers don't get along. The higher end Dells have a touch pad with a line along the side and bottom that allows you to scroll like a wheel on a mouse. The cheaper one's like the one I got for myself don't have that ability on the touchpad.
Depending on how far from home she will be and what resources are in the town, I know Best Buy is a Dell warranty provider, I'm sure there are others, but it might be nice to check if you can and see if the company has someone in the city where she will be to provide warranty work unless she will be close to home, I know that might influence my decision of what to buy.
MOST IMPORTANT, get her one of the portable hard drives that have flooded the market. Western Digital makes one, about the size of my blackberry, holds 250 gig, costs less than $100. Teach her to back up religiously. Good rule of thumb is once you've got more done than you would want to redo if you lost it then back it up. These are simple to use, plug into the usb port, fairly reliable as far as I can tell. We had computers a long time and never had a problem, my desktop crashed twice this last year and my daughters old laptop crashed on her last fall. Luckily we didn't lose any data, it cost us a lot of time and money getting things back that would have been much easier if we'd had a good backup.
That's my 2 cents.
PS the backing up applies to everyone who has a computer. Sooner or later the law of averages catches up with you. We have a total of 4 backups stored before we erase one, that way if there ever is a glitch or problem we can go to a prior one. We also plan to get hooked up to Carbonite to back up our serious data files so we have a source off the farm in case of a widespread natural disaster. | |
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Which laptop would you buy a high school grad?
