On Sun, 30 Jan 2011 20:48:48 -0800 (PST), "
wrote:


She had a older Dell Inspiron
1000 which was pretty much bottom of the line when she got it at least
5 years ago.

Piece of junk. I've inherited a few from customers that have had
them blow up on them. Typically, a 2GHz P4 Celeron CPU with no
internal Wi-Fi. Slower than a snail, even fully loaded with RAM.
Probably a good excuse or time to replace it.

Right now she is leaning toward a Toshiba.

Two of my customers/friends (the customers pay me, the friends do not)
have purchased various Toshiblah laptops recently. No problems. Get
one with an Intel i5 processor. The i3 is too slow, and the i7 is too
expensive. 4GB RAM is about right for Windoze 7.

Some Toshiblah deals at Best Buy:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olstemplatemapper.jsp?id=pcat17080&type=page&qp=cr ootcategoryid%23%23-1%23%23-1~~q70726f63657373696e6774696d653a3e313930302d3031 2d3031~~cabcat0500000%23%230%23%2311a~~cabcat05020 00%23%230%23%23o~~f510||546f7368696261~~f551||496e 74656c26233137343b~~nf546||496e74656c26233137343b2 0436f726526233135333b206935&list=y&nrp=15&sc=abCom puterSP&ks=960&usc=abcat0500000&sp=%2Bcurrentprice +skuid&list=y&iht=n&st=processingtime%3A%3E1900-01-01
Amazon has them cheaper, but you'll have to wait for the sales and
closeouts.

Our son gets paid for his work, he has solved many problems for us
over the years, and has built complete laptops using parts cobbled
from other machines.

Ok, he seems to know what he's doing. If he can't fix it, it's not
going to happen.

I'll post whatever we buy tomorrow, as a blizzard is forecast for Tue
and Wed and I leave Thursday for a skiing vacation and I will need my
laptop to use while away from home.

Fairly good weather here in California. Warmer than usual, light
rain, a bit of fog.... my kind of weather.

It takes me about 6 hours to setup a typical "ready to run" Windoze 7"
machine. 2 hrs to get Windoze 7 up to date. One hour to remove the
junkware. One hour to load it with my favorite collection of
utilities.
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/crud/favorite-utils.html
(a bit out of date and XP specific, but close enough). Another hour
to load Office 2003 and updates. One hours to show the customer (your
wife) how to use it. Probably a good thing to do while it's snowing.

Have fun skiing.



--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558