Laptop for my sister

[spikey57]

In the next couple of months, my 9 year old sister will be requiring a laptop to use for school work. The reason I say laptop is because my mums house has very little space, and my mum will be needing to use the desktop for her work. I will also be sorting out a wireless network so that there is no need to route cables or anything like that.

My mum will be paying for it, but needs me to scope a spec for the laptop. Her maximum budget will be around £350 plus around £50 for the wireless router. Probably a Linksys.

With the emergence and increasing market penetration of the ultra-portable and low cost laptops such as the Asus Eee range and the MSI Wind. I'm assuming that these would probably be the best suited for my sisters needs.

Requirements are as follows:

- Must be Windows based
- Wireless capable
- Durable
- 1GB minimum RAM (simply for peace of mind even though the most intensive thing she'll be doing is importing stuff onto an iPod and playing some educational internet games)
- CD/DVD drive (I'm making the assumption that because these are so small that this is going to be an external drive)

There is no need to worry about any sort of software packages like office etc as I'll be using either free software or legit stuff I have already lying around.

Also any advice on the performance of these types of laptop? Would it be worth doing anything with the OS such as using a tweaking program to up performance and take out any un-needed stuff??

Thanks,

spikey57

 

[split]

Most of the small ones use the same chip.
I have the Advent 4211 (clone of MSI Wind) and it's fine.

You'd have to do some research on this, but the MSI wind may have larger battery hence larger price but is she going to use this as a laptop as such (on batteries much)

You'd be looking here for external drives, but do you really need one?

 

[spikey57]

They all use the Intel Atom processor, 1.6GHz if I remember correctly? with plans to develop a dual core Atom in the works?? Or has this already been released?

I already own an external drive, but thanks for the link anyways. The only reason I included it in the specs was for data back up, schoolwork etc, and operating system reinstalls. (I know you can create bootable USB drives and use them as an alternative)

I know that you can get these kinds of laptop with an 80gb hard disk, but it's always good to have a backup solution just to be safe.

Thanks for the help.

spikey57