Thread: Laptop and what to look for

I want to buy a laptop for my daughter. What do I need to make sure it has? I want to be sure she can surf the net and also do her school projects on it.
Any specifications I need to be sure to get? Brand?

I bought a laptop from Dell early last year, it has Windows Vista and McAfee as an antivirus, I've had to reload this thing no less than 4 times (as a result of the infamous blue screen of death) since I got it, not to mention countless hours on the phone with tech support in India.
Eventually (after purchasing a $200.00 software support license) after suggesting to tech support that I suspect a compatibility problem betwwen Vista and McAfee, did they log onto my machine and removed McAfee, it eventually crashed again and I reloaded the whole thing from CD, thus eliminating McAfee altogether from even getting onto my hard drive.
It has been running trouble free for the last 3 month. Count on well over a day for the first reload, eventually you get it down to about 6 hours and a lot of frustration, inversely proportional to how computer savvy you are (I come from a mainframe computer technical background).
I'm sure this might not apply, now that Win 7 is out, but stay away from any product running Vista (I know some retailers are still blowing some Vista loaded computer away) same with McAfee, this thing has been a pain in the butt and I would not trust it even with Win 7 and good luck if you need support, be prepared for long phone session (the longest for me was 3.5 hours) and I'm sure most of them are in India, nothing against India and for the most part they are knowledgeable and most willing to help, but from their names and accents, you just know that they are not located in Boston or Atlanta.

I am sorry for what you experienced. I read on the net, there are many complains about Vista. So I think you'd better stay away from the OS. It's better to have either XP or Win 7 in your laptop.