Fellow watchers,
my parents live in a village and until now had an old single core Win XP desktop PC with 128MB of RAM and dialup Internet speed (about 7.6kb/s without a flatrate). Yes, you read that right.
The village is finally getting real Internet access in the form of glass fiber, and my dad said he just got 100Mbit with a theoretical limit of 125Mbit (!). Now I'm jealous, and he needs to replace his old PC in order to harness all that juicy speed (and a WLAN router and all that, of course).
I already narrowed the choice down to a more or less budget 17" laptop as a desktop replacement with Win 8.1. He's going to work on it (Office and basic photo / video editing plus lots of music listening and soon YouTube video watching ) ) — nothing too fancy though and no real gaming.
So, is there anything any of you can recommend in that regard?
I'm also wondering about which brand I should get for him. I'm mostly interested in their support policy. Like, can the OS be upgraded later? I had contact with a HP laptop with Windows Vista once, which could be upgraded later to Win7 — there was official driver support. But now I read that some Win8 laptops can't be upgraded to Win 8.1? Any experience with HP, Asus, Dell, Lenovo, etc.?
His budget is about €500 - €700 ($685 - $960). I don't suppose he could get an SSD with that...?
my parents live in a village and until now had an old single core Win XP desktop PC with 128MB of RAM and dialup Internet speed (about 7.6kb/s without a flatrate). Yes, you read that right.
The village is finally getting real Internet access in the form of glass fiber, and my dad said he just got 100Mbit with a theoretical limit of 125Mbit (!). Now I'm jealous, and he needs to replace his old PC in order to harness all that juicy speed (and a WLAN router and all that, of course).
I already narrowed the choice down to a more or less budget 17" laptop as a desktop replacement with Win 8.1. He's going to work on it (Office and basic photo / video editing plus lots of music listening and soon YouTube video watching ) ) — nothing too fancy though and no real gaming.
So, is there anything any of you can recommend in that regard?
I'm also wondering about which brand I should get for him. I'm mostly interested in their support policy. Like, can the OS be upgraded later? I had contact with a HP laptop with Windows Vista once, which could be upgraded later to Win7 — there was official driver support. But now I read that some Win8 laptops can't be upgraded to Win 8.1? Any experience with HP, Asus, Dell, Lenovo, etc.?
His budget is about €500 - €700 ($685 - $960). I don't suppose he could get an SSD with that...?
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- Aug 30, 2006
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