But on a more serious note...

In my experience of buying (or having work edition) Winders lappies I have found this:

1) If you want gaming level performance, sound and graphics cards you'll pay through the nose and after 18 months it will already be struggling with the latest stuff

2) No PC laptop is going to perform AS well 3 years later. No doubt in that time she'll need at least one battery replacement.

3) The higher the spec, the quicker the price will fall / it will become outdated.

What I usually do is go for the fastest CPU / core I can find which DOESN'T mean a noisy always-on fan (the first versions of most heavy processors in laptops end up running the fan all the time which is annoying). Then try to get one with a lot of RAM but which is also expandable (the first fix of course once it starts to slow). Get enough on board disk space to install and comfortably run software (to be honest anything over 250GB is fine in my opinion and most have min 500 these days). But with external storage so cheap these days it's not really an issue when thinking about storage. Get Winders 7 on it - avoid Vista like the plague. And then the sound / video cards are lowest priority. Should be decent enough to make a crisp, sharp display (easier on the eyes) and that's about it. I normally find that by doing that I'll spend about 50% of what somebody would for what they think is a top end laptop (with all the gaming-level specs), but mine will be far better in standard performance and last me 2 or 3 years without feeling completely cack. By the end I will be looking jealously at others but it still is able to do the job. Make sure you get her a quad core because that's the key - by the end of 3 years the software will be expecting quad (and higher) cores so anything below that will struggle.

Then I put it in the cupboard and buy a Mac. ;-)

Basically Macs tend to stand the test of time for a little longer, although I feel that's going in a different direction as I expect by the end of those 3 years we will see the thing to have as an Mac Book Air Pro running iOS8 with a massive flash storage, touch screen and instant-on, and iMacs with touch screens to match.

Posted By: Steve in Holland, Aug 18, 16:12:47