Computers for teens

I tried this route and bought a sub $500 laptap, Gateway from BestBuy, for my daughter in the middle of 8th grade. By the beginning of 10th grade we already had to replace the motherboard, under warranty, for an electrical short when recharging and then the entire thing crashed even though I studiously bough anti-virus software.

Against my better advise we bought a MacBook Pro, the smallest and cheapest one. 2 years later it runs perfectly and will last her through college unless she spills beer on it. I would rather have done Apple in junior or senior year of HS, but 10th grade seems to be fine. Apple Air seems great and cheaper than MacBook. If you buy a windows based laptop for kids, it will be virus infected in 2 years, no matter what you do.

Also, call your homeowners insurance company and see if they have a rider for computers. We did and we do and for dollars a month all of our computers and iphones are covered without having to buy the outrageous thrid party insurance offered by the retailer or the manufacturer.

 

Best Buy will negotiate on open items as well. They just want to get rid of the thing if it's out of the box.

 

Best Buy will rip your ass off. Go to TigerDirect and pick up a couple that are on sale. Perhaps some slightly older models with Windows 7 installed. Brands matter very little with PCs.

 

Have a 9th grader and 7th grader; the HP one we bought 2 years ago is functional, but a bit slow; the Dell we bought last year works very well.

Parental controls on surfing is a PITA; I have all but given up and crossed my fingers now trusting my boys; but computers stay out in the living room where we can see them. It wasn't porn or something like that, it was playing games and surfing when they were supposed to do homework; I swear I lost 5 years of my life last year yelling and screaming.

Look on eBay for education versions of the MS Suite.

 

I'm on a college campus now and using their wifi for my Chrome laptop.

I use flash drives for most of my storage and it has three USB ports, plus an SD card slot to add memory. Truthfully, I have no idea how much memory this bad boy has, but I know it works with my paper's cloud-based front end system and the work e-mail is now gmail.

My Fitbit dongle doesn't seem to work on it or at least I haven't figured out how it works yet, but everything else I use a laptop for, I can do on this machine.

Did I mention it only cost three hundred bucks?

 

To run counter to the anti-Best Buy advice here, haha... I got my current laptop from there for $350, I believe, and it's a Dell. The fan broke in the summer, for which there was a free repair, but otherwise it's been about 18 months with no serious issues. If you just want something that will let your kids browse the web, do papers and PowerPoints for school, and some minor audio / video editing, then just about any basic laptop will probably be more than enough power.

It's hard to think of them this way, given how major a purchase they were in the past, but you should almost view laptops as a disposable commodity that you get every 2 to 4 years now. While they've hit a sort of plateau in recent years - in that most now have way more processing power than the everyday user could possibly ever need - there is usually a minor improvement that you wouldn't have had even if you bought a top of the line system X years ago.

Example: My current laptop HD (cheap model) is 500 gig, where my last laptop three years prior was 150 gig. External HD are in a similar category, where I got a 500gig one for $100 five years ago, and this past year, $100 got me a 3,000 gig external HD.

 

The issue I have with Best Buy isn't the quality of the product or the prices, necessarily. It's that you'd better know exactly what you're doing with the computer purchase or they will try to screw you, hard.

My elderly mother-in-law recently bought a computer from Best Buy. The salesman convinced her to buy some shitty Best Buy-endorsed anti-virus software, telling her it was now federal law that she must buy some form of anti-virus software with her computer. (He picked the wrong woman. I explained the reality to her. My mother in law is a giant pain in the ass who lives to return things to stores.)

 

Had the same type of thing happen with my late father in law, who was a cattle farmer living in the middle of nowhere as his retirement job, and he also kept a business going as a commodities broker. He went there and bought their top-of-the-line setup, then the clerk gave him the spiel about the "in-home" service and how if anything goes wrong, they will send someone right out to fix it on site. He explained he lived in the boonies, about an hour away from the store, and how his business is crippled for every day his computer isn't functional. The clerk said it doesn't matter, they'll come out and handle it right away.

Of course, about a month in, something gets jacked up with the computer, the father in law calls Best Buy, and they set up the appointment to have someone come out to look at it - and their next open appointment was in 5-6 weeks. When the store opened the next morning, he was waiting and dumped the entire setup (probably about $3,500 back in the mid 1990s) on their customer service counter and didn't leave until they gave him every cent of his money back.

 

The Best Buy Black Tie warranty is shit. All it does is give you someone else's refurbished piece of shit. I had an iPod Classic a few years back that suffered a hard drive failure. Got a replacement and it happened again. Got another, and guess what? That model was prone to hard drive failures. I demanded a new-in-the-box device or the full value of the device. They gave me a gift card, and I turned around and bought a brand-new iPod touch (they were out of Classics).

 

Yeah, as others have said - I didn't bother with any of the Best Buy warranty stuff, and never do. Walmart also asks if you want to "warranty" stuff when you buy it for an extra $3 to $5, even if it's like a PS3 game or something else that's covered for 90 days. Gamestop as well. It's almost always a crock of shit.