Laptop for son - suggestions?

[jay clock]

This is JC's wife using CycleChat while he's skiing... 12 year old son has decided he'd like to pool all Christmas/birthday presents so he can buy himself a laptop, ideally around the £350 mark. Mainly for Facebook and homework but for a bit of gaming too so needs to have reasonable graphics. The Lenovo G570 seems to get a good write-up but has a bewildering amount of different specs with differing prices. Any thoughts or recommendations? Any idea what I should be looking at as a minimum for graphics? Any suggestions would be great.

 

[Globalti]

I wouldn't worry too much about the spec for a child's computer. Our son got an Acer notebook when he was 11 and we have been amazed at how robust it has been. On one occasion when it did break down, we were also very impressed by Acer's after-sales service.

 

[fossyant]

Graphics will be a limiting factor on any laptop - most stuff they are OK, but if you want the latest games then they will struggle - but at 12 I assume he's not playing these kill fest Battlefield etc type games.

Ideally try and get Nvidia or ATI graphics chipsets and as much RAM as possible. This means it will zip along nicely. Lots of choice !

 

[jay clock]

Thanks for this - will try to get my head around Nvidia/ATI graphic chipsets. Feel son will probably know more than me.

Wife of JC

 

[ColinJ]

I've been quite impressed by the various different £350 laptops that I've seen recently. The ASUS that my niece got for Christmas was pretty good after I cleared it of the malware she had downloaded within hours of getting it - make sure that you install some decent anti-virus software on your son's machine!

If you can stand the hassle of being in charge of all software installation, make yourself the system administrator and set up a standard account for your son to limit the damage he could do to it by installing rogue software.

 

[jay clock]

Thanks ColinJ

Wife of JC