Christmas is coming soon, TigerMom is going to be taking some online classes next semester so her 6 year old laptop is due for an upgrade.
I'd like to surprise her with something new and shiny. What would you recommend? No gaming, nothing particularly fancy needed, just durable and reliable. Something easy for non-techy people to just use. Not spend our days programming/working on/whatever.
edit: budget is (as ever) as GRM as possible. Is a $200 laptop a viable thing? Or do I have to spend $500?
I think I personally would want a bit bigger screen than this, but here's a detachable at a decent price. Extra 15% off in cart on Amazon today too. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00NJF1PGQ?m=A2L77EE7U53NWQ&qid=1448892847&ref_=sr_1_14&s=warehouse-deals&sr=1-14
No way on a $200 laptop unless you want her throwing it at you after the first 5-minutes waiting for it to boot up fully, the Internet to load, etc.
Here's my recommendation to everyone for bare minimum specs:
1.) Quad-core processor. AMD is cheaper and gets you ~90% the performance as Intel for ~50% the cost.
2.) As much memort(RAM) as you can get. 6GB is a bare minimum, 12GB wouldn't hurt. As long as it can be expanded, it's pretty cheap & easy to upgrade later.
3.) Does she need a 10-key keypad?
4.) Budget around $400 minimum. If you find one on sale/clearance for ~$350 you'll probably be ok, but cheap laptops have cheap complements that fail, usually within 2-3 years, and usuallt its the motherboard, processor, display, or hard drive.
5.) If you don't mind a daily email, sign up for the Toshiba daily deal notifications. We've had very good results from their laptops(dropped down stairs, etc.) and once or twice per month they offer a decent quad-core for $350-$400 on sale. It's a 1-day only price though.
She already has a Surface that looks almost exactly like that. She is making noises like it needs to be more "substantial" for school purposes.
This seems like a good deal today:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834298944&ignorebbr=1
My wife uses a 249 dollar compaq. Works great, even manages to play games because it has a stand alone graphics card. We replace it with another one of the same version just updated every 2 years.
Newegg has managed to berkeley up their site pretty badly today so forget linking to them it just keeps sending you to a landing page in Chrome and opening new tabs with the same screen, it works okay if you stick with it in Firefox.
That said I'm in the process of buying wife unit a ASUS X555UB-NH51 (Item N82E16834232793 in case some of you want to search for it) which is on sale after toddler unit pushed hers off the desk and broke the screen.
6th gen Intel Skylake I5 thats only a few months old (dual core since hardly anything uses distributed processing anyway)? - check
Dedicated video card (Nvidia 940M) - Check
1 TB drive? - Check
All the rest of the standard optical drives, 2 USB 3.0s and network equipment? - check
Bonus points: A 15.6 screen that displays 1920 x 1080 rather than the irritating 1366 x 786.
$589? Guess that's what she's getting.
