We swore we wouldn't do it; Wewouldn't buy our newly hatched high schooler a laptop with that "fresh OS smell" but we did. Tales from the Labor Day weekend shopping trip with a happy ending.
For years, I've been telling the 14-year old that the two hand-me-down laptops in the house would be good enough for her new high school career. We'd just got her settled into her own room for the first time since the baby of the family arrived seven years ago. She has a new desk. So despite my knowledge that it is always easier to monitor what your children do if the computer remains in a public room, we've been allowing her to use those old laptops for a while now, even in the privacy of her new room. I just borrow and log into those computers from time to time and make sure the security software is running and nothing odd is going on. Since I'm on her Facebook and have logins to most of her accounts, I hope I can trust her to use laptops in general with smarts.
But for the last few weeks, these old laptops have been increasingly unreliable. And my husband and I have spent far too much time working on them to keep them going. So after passing her door several times in one day to the plaintive cries of "it crashed AGAIN" and watching how long it took to boot up, I saw the light. I weighed the options of getting someone to reimage or otherwise overhaul these very old laptops or biting the bullet and getting her something brand new. And either way I saw my credit card bill getting bigger. It was one or the other. Whatever the cause, I found myself visiting three successive office supply and big box stores to review laptop options in the "under $1000" category. I wish there was a category called "just a bit more than GeekSquad charges to overhaul the old one."
Who had the great idea to lock down the laptops with metal bars so you can't feel how much they weigh? OK, if you need to lock them to the table, then list the weight and other specifications so you can really evaluate them. And why is there never more than one model in this price range that hasn't crashed on the demo station? Is that a not-so-subtle message that the stuff in this price range is unreliable? And we never found someone in the store who could help us. Not that there was a shortage of staff on the floor. It's just that a few thousand other parents had the same idea on Labor Day weekend and came to the same stores to shop. So lines were just awful, even to ask a "quick question."
Our story has a happy ending. It was a pretty hot day in Los Angeles so after visiting several stores and getting increasingly warm and frustrated (me, not my daughter - she was beaming with joy that we were actually shopping for her very own computer), we went home to get online. We visited the "major online shopping site" where we could compare different models in the desired price category and read reviews and comments. We visited a major PC magazine to see which models they recommended. We evaluated weight information very seriously since my daughter's backpack weighs a ton. We also visited several manufacturer websites before finally selecting our desired model and configuration. And then we made our purchase decision. In about a week, my high schooler will have her very own freshly built laptop. And I'll even give it her fairly quickly. First I have to install Norton 360 or Norton Internet Security, turn off the webcam, and post next to her new desk our family online safety rules. I love a happy ending, don't you? And a happy teenager is even more wonderful and rare!