Recommend A Laptop For My 9 Year Old Daughter, Windows 10 Sucks, Please Prove Otherwise...

[marzjennings]

I bought my first PC ever last November (survived on work hand-me-downs for over twenty years) a Dell 2-in-1 15in screen thing with Windows 10. Great little PC, boots in seconds, great battery life, handy to have both tablet and normal forms. I find Win 10 an improvement over previous MS OS’s, but that’s more do to with improved office integration than stand alone performance. Oh and I did reinstall the OS from a scratch to remove all bloatware.

 

[Fnaar]

I have Windows 10, and no probs with it at all.
One idea might be (which I also use when travelling) is an ipad with Bluetooth keyboard . Handles all MS docs well, though for PowerPoint I only read on iPad, not design. I work in edumacation, and use PowerPoint a lot. Typing Word docs is a breeze, as is emails and stuff. I'm also editing a book at the moment, and a lot of that has been done on the ipad.

 

[MartinQ]

Got one of these a couple of months ago for £300
https://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/compu...d-320s-14ikb-14-laptop-grey-10164431-pdt.html
and it's decent at that price. SSD is 128GB, which is enough for windows 10 and a reasonable number of apps, 4gb ram is just enough (I usually run at ~3gb), .... For some reason, the price has gone back up by ~£100. I'd say 128GB is minimum for running windows & apps and I have a 64 sd card for storing documents/photos, which is backed up/synched to google drive, just in case of failure & so they can access from school, if necessary.

I think the 520s was ~£500 on a good day which had double ram, ssd, ... check the specs though.

Main reason for getting one was for the kids doing (MS) office stuff for school. I'm happy with google docs etc, but they're not :-).

 

[Dan B]

[QUOTE 5274699, member: 45"] The laptop rarely comes out from under the sofa[/QUOTE]
What's it scared of?

 

[Electric_Andy]

I would suggest that the bloat issue is more with what the manufacturer/retailer put on rather than Windows 10 itself. I run Windows 10 on a very low powered media PC and it is fast as Windows 7 before it.

I would echo that. I bought a laptop from Tesco a year or so ago for £289. Intel core i3, 4gb ram, Win10. I hate win10 so installed a windows 7 shell so now all the menus and homescreen etc run like the old fashioned windows did. It's still plenty fast enough for me so I'd imagine yours is full of bloatware from the retailer. I also installed CCleaner which is very good. I cleaned mine up a bit, I'm not very good with IT so if I can get lots of the stuff off then I'm sure you can too.

 

[User10119]

Win 10 has been fine for me, on the laptop I use and on the 100 or so laptops/PCs I support (some of which are pretty antique in computing terms!) although the MAHOOSIVE update that has been dribbling out of M$ over the last couple of months has taken forever to download/install across several sites and been a bit of a 'mare.

Chromebooks are grand if it's just for documents and webby stuff. The presentation and ss software is perfectly competent for school work. You can tell it you will want be [edit]ABLE TO[/edit] work offline, so you can continue work on existing docs and create new ones and they synch back up once you are somewhere with wifi again. The automatic saving and the web-based storage is a bit of a godsend for kids too. The small size can actually work really well for small people with small hand and good eyesight! They're cheap and the entry level Dells we have (I support a couple of hundred across various sites) do the job well.

 

[Cletus Van Damme]

Sounds like I've bought a piece of crap by the looks of it. I'm pretty anti-Windows 10, as I bought one of those micro PC's with 32GB storage a year ago for my daughters TV. It wouldn't update Windows 10 because there wasn't enough space. There was some complicated work around that didn't work, then it wasn't working properly so I decided to format it. The settings icon had just completely disappeared, and it was impossible to format it. I googled it and apparently it was commonplace at the time. I just returned it, as I'd invested too much time, bought a Gigabyte Brix, an SSD, 4GB ram, put Windows 7 on, a few drivers, end of story. But yes, that appeared to operate a lot faster than the laptop I bought. It didn't appear to have as much garbage on it though, guess its impossible with 32GB.

I just don't like Windows 10, I didn't like Windows Millennium Addition either, that was a complete pile of **** I'll maybe try again with it....

 

[User10119]

If you had Win8 inflicted on you anywhere, Win10 was a blessed and merciful release when it appeared.

Switch off the Cortana nonsense, install a couple of decent web browsers (and teach the Small person that if it doesn't work in one, try it in another*) instead of that Edge rubbish and do sufficient battle to really convince it about your default browser app and it's mostly fine.

*I've got classes of kids who now mostly happily hop around three different browsers depending on what task they are doing and who solve half their IT problems either themselves or with support from a classmate, without bothering a teacher/the Technician - that's me btw. Teach a chap to fish and all that

 

[MartinQ]

Sounds like I've bought a piece of crap by the looks of it. I'm pretty anti-Windows 10, as I bought one of those micro PC's with 32GB storage a year ago for my daughters TV. It wouldn't update Windows 10 because there wasn't enough space. There was some complicated work around that didn't work, then it wasn't working properly so I decided to format it. The settings icon had just completely disappeared, and it was impossible to format it. I googled it and apparently it was commonplace at the time. I just returned it, as I'd invested too much time, bought a Gigabyte Brix, an SSD, 4GB ram, put Windows 7 on, a few drivers, end of story. But yes, that appeared to operate a lot faster than the laptop I bought. It didn't appear to have as much garbage on it though, guess its impossible with 32GB.

I just don't like Windows 10, I didn't like Windows Millennium Addition either, that was a complete pile of **** I'll maybe try again with it....

Unfortunately there are far too many 32GB windows 10 machines sold which have exactly the problem you describe. Realistically 128gb is minimum and even then a bit extra is useful to use as file storage. TBH, I don't see how the manufacturers get away with it.

 

[KneesUp]

I think you are projecting your anti-Windows bias. I use Ubuntu when I can, and Windows if I have to (i.e. sometimes at work, but even then I use VNC to view a Windows OS on my Ubuntu laptop) but my daughter has a Windows laptop because she's 9,and that's what she wanted because that's what they use at school. She likes it. She might carry on liking it all her life, or she might change to another preferred OS as I have - I did go through an OSX phase pre-Intel too - but I'm not going to force an OS on her. She can just observe that the one I use is far superior ... (waits whilst it 'discovers' the printer at home. Again)

It an HP Stream of some description. She uses Libre Office, Audacity, Spotify, Scribus and browses the web on it quite happily. It got a bit grumpy when there wasn't enough HDD space to run one of the big updates but I sorted it out with the help of a bit of a google about for advice. It wasn't too pricey, has a touch screen that works well, can fold back on itself to be a big tablet and has a long battery life.

 

[Cletus Van Damme]

[QUOTE 5274838, member: 10119"]If you had Win8 inflicted on you anywhere, Win10 was a blessed and merciful release when it appeared.

Switch off the Cortana nonsense, install a couple of decent web browsers (and teach the Small person that if it doesn't work in one, try it in another*) instead of that Edge rubbish and do sufficient battle to really convince it about your default browser app and it's mostly fine.

*I've got classes of kids who now mostly happily hop around three different browsers depending on what task they are doing and who solve half their IT problems either themselves or with support from a classmate, without bothering a teacher/the Technician - that's me btw. Teach a chap to fish and all that [/QUOTE]

The computer I bought was a dud, I went to PC world and none of the laptops behaved like the one I had. I've cried for nothing. I still do not care for Windows 10 though, but again its not for me and my daughter probably uses 10 at school anyway. I agree that Edge looks like garbage, as is Cortana. I heard that Windows 8 was absolutely dire, I never had the experience or want it either.

Sorry for the rant...

 

[Profpointy]

Re:windows. A good rule of thumb is that every other major release of microsoft products are shyte. Thus XP was fine, vista was shocking, W7 was great, windows 8 awful and now W10 is perfectly ok.

Edit: this princuple also applied with versions of word and their C complier back in the day

 

[KneesUp]

Re:windows. A good rule of thumb is that every other major release of microsoft products are shyte. Thus XP was fine, vista was shocking, W7 was great, windows 8 awful and now W10 is perfectly ok.

Edit: this princuple also applied with versions of word and their C complier back in the day

I can go with that - although 2000 was ok if you reinstalled it every 6 months. That said, it was having to do that that led me to abandon Windows for OS X Panther. My current laptop is dual boot Ubuntu / Win 7 and 7 is ok. The machine I have to connect to at work in Win 8, which I've had to skin to look like a normal version of Windows with a Start button. It's ok but it does annoying things - it decided the perfectly functioning internet connection was limited for a week or so and as a result refused to do any updates.

Glad you're sorted OP. The Microsoft 'Family Features' are good in theory but for some reason it keeps asking my daughter to log in again. She can't get to the dailymail website though, so that bit works

 

[Jenkins]

Something like this perhaps frem Ebuyer - Windows 10, 4gb RAM, Core i5 processor and 128gb SSD for £380

https://www.ebuyer.com/800868-lenovo-v110-i5-laptop-80th0013uk

 

[MartinQ]

The computer I bought was a dud, I went to PC world and none of the laptops behaved like the one I had. I've cried for nothing. I still do not care for Windows 10 though, but again its not for me and my daughter probably uses 10 at school anyway. I agree that Edge looks like garbage, as is Cortana. I heard that Windows 8 was absolutely dire, I never had the experience or want it either.

Sorry for the rant...

Personally, its more about the apps these days (and will be for your daughter). The kids have their android / chrome tablets and its surprising how much you can do with them, using google docs to tons of free games to python and designing a website with mysql, php, javascript, ... The range of apps seems "better" (for kids playing) than in windows 10 and adding a keyboard to a tablet is relatively easy/cheap. However, they also wanted a laptop to run steam, sims, ms office (in google office and libre, the existing powerpoints sometimes go a bit haywire and for better or worse, both like using publisher to "waste time" arranging stuff in a pretty way). So windows 10 it pretty much had to be. I use a fair amount of google stuff on windows 10 (chrome, gmail, calendar, office - a bit, back up and sync, keep, maps, ...) which would be the same if I was running android.

Main bad point about windows 10 is the disk requirements. You can run android / reasonable number of apps on a 16gb tablet. Windows 10 + apps probably needs 5 times that. I know there are a lot of technical differences between the OSs, but its mainly about the apps / games these days. A windows 10 laptop with an SSD (128gb+) is reasonably light, reasonably fast, ...