That's pretty cool ... at home I still have and use an old Dell desktop PC bought in 2005 ... a real dinosaur, but the darn thing has hardly been turned off in 8 years ('cept when the power goes out! LOL!) and yet it still works and allows me to surf the net and do email ... sure it's slow as cold molassas, but as reliable as a brick!

The latest entry is the Dell XPS 18, a Windows 8 computer with an 18.4 inch touchscreen, a 5 hour battery, and a starting price of $900.



and a starting price of $900.


starting price of $900.


price of $900


$900


$900



$900




Errrrrmmm,,, no..


HOWEVER,, I would be willing to take any suggestions from knowledgeable people. My daughter dropped her laptop. Fell about 18", landed on a corner. Now, when it warms up, the screen changes colors & looks weird. I dont think its reapirable now, because weve been in it twice & last time in I used super glue to hold stuff in one of the hinge areas. I doubt itll ever open & close right again if it gets taken apart again,It was a pricey dude about 4 years ago.

She is in College, needs a computer. Not necessarily a laptop or tablet. It could stay right on or under her desk,, need to be able to spreadsheets & basic business app type things. Im pretty sure the college website wont even work with a Non windows machine,,( that aint right, IMO)
anyway, Bang for the buck, who has a good solution?

Those are much appreciated nuggets. Will do & Ill check New Egg out before we do anything.

Greg wrote on 03/13/13 at 11:27:36:


Linux will work with active directory domains without any issue.  This was done a long time ago, also I believe Macs also support it as alot of college students use macbook laptops in college now.

As for the issue of possibly requiring a windows os at the college it would most likely be due to certain applications that are specifically written for each course, some will work in linux with Wine but some won't depending on the college and maker of the programs.

A little off topic but...

rfw, my buddy uses a computer for p0rn. Period. I got tired of fixing it and set him up with Ubuntu. No more issues. Linux is truly p0rn-friendly!  

No, I'm getting a Surface.

But seriously, I will get one with the mechanical keyboard. Been dying to try Win8 on a touchscreen and I need to replace my poor little pathetic 900MHz netbook.

I've recently been using Windows 8 as my primary OS, after using it off and on for testing ever since the RC came out for it and absolutely hating it.  We purchased some new laptops at work that came with Windows 8, a few Dell XPS machines that look awfully similar to Macbook Pros, and found that the "legitimate" downgrade process was somewhat more of a pain than we had been promised by the manufacturer.  I discovered if you disable a lot of the stuff that makes Windows 8, well, Windows 8... it's actually a lot like Windows 7, which I like quite a bit.

The most important thing was getting rid of the new tile-based Start menu (well, pushing it to the background, actually) by using a nice little tool called Classic Shell (http://www.classicshell.net/).  The next was disabling a lot of the gestures from the touchpad, which completely drove me insane when using it without a mouse.

There are some things that I really like about it... The improvements they have done to simple things are making it grow on me: a more useful dialog when copying large amounts of files from one place to another (similar to some of the things I've seen in Linux desktops), a task bar designed for multiple monitors (even better than Ultramon, imho), if you're familiar with that), etc.