Need advice on a laptop

Stay away from Compaq and HP laptops. My wife and I have had good luck with Toshiba laptops. For desktops, I'm not sure it matters. You can get a decent deal on an Emachine at Best Buy.

I own a fairly new Alienware, which does a great job of doing what i need as a programmer and plays most games well, so you know there's plenty of power. Those are really expensive. However, my sister and mom got Gateways that really worked out well. My sister even played her fair share of games on it and it had a nice wide screen. Unfortantly, at a quick glance, it seems like you'll be spending $1000 for a new laptop. you could get away with a cheaper desktop, but if he's going to be gaming a good video card will be important, which run a couple hundred dollars by themselves.

Either way, whatever you end up doing, my one GOOD suggestion is that you do not skimp on the RAM. Get 2-3GB for maximum productivity. :)

Dell Small Business always has some fairly good promotions. Go here and click "Notebooks" to see what's available now.

It might pay to wait until next month, when you'll see the first Intel Core 2 Duo laptops, but, because new processors are always more expensive, these may not end up in your price range. The processor line is expected to launch tomorrow.

I would recommend looking at your university as step one. Many schools give discounts, and you should certainly qualify. They will also tell you what the minimum requirements are for incoming students, (hard disk size, Memory requiremnsts, Wi-Fi capable etc.) and depending on how old your son is, you might consider upgrading from the minimum.

Got my son, who is a Grad Student a laptop through Office Max last year, just looked for what was on sale,paid @ $600, and he has had no problems with it.

Happy Birthday and good luck!

Making Flash movies requires a lot of RAM and a fast processor. It'll be a real challenge to find something cheap that will do that well. One nice thing about getting it from a University, is that they proably have a showroom, and may let you try a task like that before you buy it. I don't think you could do that at Best Buy.

On the other hand, it may be that he does not care how long it takes for that particular thing, or maybe he is only planning to do short little clips.

I've only had one laptop, and it was a Compaq, and I had a good experience with it. But I got that in 1993, so the experience is hardly relevant.

For now, he makes lots of short (but creative) clips. He's turning 13 - Bar Mitzvah and stuff. He grew up on a computer and if anything goes wrong on mine, I wait for him to come back from school because he'll fix it (and I have no idea how).

If I buy from a place like Dell.com, I can pay 20 or 30 or even 50 dollars a month, which is something I can afford (as long as my traffic here remains the same!). If I go to other kinds of places I'll have to plunk down $600 (or $1000) in one lump sum, which is what we cannot afford.

http://news.com.com/2060-11728_3-0.html?tag=nefd.aof

For what its worth, our experience with Compaq has been good.
We got our oldest son a compter as he entered high school because, frankly, the same number of hours spent training a calf to write would have produced a more readable result than my boy's handwriting. The machine was used for everything and he got so handy with it he could dissassemble it to add more memory [which, given its vintage, it needed for the upgrade from win98/me to winXP]...and yes every tune and app out there that was not bolted down found its way onto this poor little machine. It is still working though he's had to put a lot of duct tape and hot melt glue on it where accidents broke the connectors loose from the case.
That is not a complaint if you knew the hard knocks.
Last year, his sophistication as a user and his collection of software was well past what a 7 year old laptop could handle. We bought him a bigger Compaq, with a huge battery and built in wireless. He in return, upgraded the house with a wireless router so he does not have to bring his own back from the dorm when he visits. His laptop has more memory and nearly the same speed as our desktop machines, its doing fine after a hear of cranking out biochem term papers and downloading gigabytes of video and music.

We paid very nearly $1k for the new laptop. We paid $1200 for his original laptop because we were neophyte bigbox shoppers. He has gotten really good at using NewEgg and eBay to buy motherboards and other system components to make just the computer he wants. [for about 2k, he configured and assembled a home entertainment computer for us that has half a terabyte for storing shows, a TiVo-workalike ATI tuner peripheral product with software to capture stuff off the cable or off the air and 5.1 speaker system...my point in mentioning this is: let the kid learn PC technology and it may pay you back in practical ways]

Thank you all. I'll be making the final decision later today. You have all been great help.

After reading the full article, I thought the school-based distribution model was an excellent idea: it reduces the chance the laptops will be scrapped or sold, and encourages an educational use of the laptop.