A new Dell Laptop

Amanda has managed to get about 6 years life out of the laptop we bought her while she was still in high school. She ran out of hard drive space a long time ago, just after she got into music downloads, and of course memory requirements are much greater now then they were six years ago. So to get by we invested in an external hard drive. By moving all the music and pictures to the external drive the built in drive had enough breathing space to actually function as work space for the operating system. As far as memory goes, I installed the memory I took out of my laptop when I moved to Vista into hers. Between those two changes she managed to get this last years use out of the old machine.

Graduation brought some money into her life and we decided to use part of it to purchase a replacement machine. We did a similar thing for Jamie when she graduated from Western Michigan but she decided she could get by with a desktop machine. You sure can purchase a lot more machine in a desktop configuration then you can as a laptop for the same amount of money.
We have had good luck purchasing refurbished machines from Dell, as a matter of fact the last three laptops we purchased have all been refurbished. You don't get to customize it but there is usually a good inventory of machines, so you can pretty much get whatever you are looking for. I have been looking into Dell's new Vestro line. These are geared to the business user so they aren't bleeding edge but are put together with good components and don't have all the "crapware" loaded like the normal consumer machines. I call all the trial applications that get loaded to most new machines "crapware". They are either only good for a short "trial" period or are partially crippled so you will shell out the money for the real product.

Other great thing about refurbished is it's ready to ship as soon as you decided on which one to purchase. I found and ordered it on Sunday and we received it on Thursday. The bad thing about that was now I needed to get busy transferring all the songs and pictures and other stuff she had accumulated over the past few years to the new machine.

Here is the rundown on the machine we purchased at $1,097 including a 3 year extended warranty, sales tax and shipping.
Vestro 1700 laptop
17" display
Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 (2.2GHz)
3 GB memory
160 gig hard drive
8X DVD writer
Nvidia 256meg graphics card

It actually took me a couple of days to do the transfers using Vista's included ‘Windows Easy Transfer’ utility, which included a failed first attempt. I am not sure what happened because I didn't do anything different with the second try than I did in the original attempt. All I know is when I went back to check on the progress the old machine had stalled with a write error.

Additional applications I loaded for her were Office XP and Trend Micro Internet Security. I figure any security suite that survived through 4 years at MSU with no infections was something we needed to stick with!