Simpler to just give her your current best machine, then replace it with something you want later on.

She can't want more than the best one you got without seeming ungrateful and she won't do that.

She can't seem to tell you what she wants or needs feature-wise.

You know you can do OK using the Chromebook until you get a replacement.

Give her the good one that is only part of a year old, or tell her to pick something out at Best Buy.

How old is this daughter?    What does she do with her laptop?





When I was computer shopping with my kid she had a spec sheet from her school.    Two years out of date, that sheet was.

She had CAD programs that she ran in a school lab and she was always complaining about how slow everything was on the machines in the lab.

hee hee ....... She walked into the lab two weeks later with her new 5.5 pound 64 bit Athlon 64 laptop and she found she could run Solidworks renders on her new laptop faster than the lab machines could run the same files.   That was the most expensive laptop I ever bought, ever.   Solidworks software wasn't cheap either.

Of course she complained about lugging the 5.5 pounds around all the time ........



Her next need was something to put all her engineering files on to for transport.    She got one of the very first USB hard drives with a big 64 meg (not gig, meg) carrying capacity.   It could move a large CAD file .......  she wound up with a later on version at 20 gigabytes transfer capacity for the same $$$$ as her first one.


It is your daughter, you are allowed to spoil her a bit.

Ask her if she has to have a laptop.

Much better power to price ratios exists in buying a used dell workstation right now.

Downside is that using workstation chips in MS products can get pricey.

Memory cost is higher too as nothing about the machine is "consumer level" stuff.

Software costs will be higher as some standard Windows softwares do not work well on Intel workstations, you need to get the workstation version of what you have.

Ask her if she can use Ubuntu or another Linux variant.   Just ask her.

Linux is always full workstation software -- there is no "consumer level" in Linux software.   No joke, Mint Mate will discover her hardware and run on her machine, no matter what it is ........



Dumb questions,

Why isn't this 31 year old out there buying her own computers?

How much does she know about computers?

Sounds like she just wants you to give her your current most modern machine ........

Is your wife involved in this request??? ----- if so the answer is simple ----- do what it takes to make your wife happy.

Unless I am mistaken all of "your" stuff and settings are on the hard drive.  I'd pull that drive and toss it in a compatible replacement if you want to give away your current PC.  

Eegore wrote on 08/10/21 at 05:37:44:



Mike can't load an OS on a new drive.    Mike doesn't have drives sitting around in his computer room.    Mike could't change his machine's boot order if you put a pistol to his head.

Mike's daughter wants Mike to "take care of this computer mess".
........ so very very screwed .......

This defines what MS wants for you ---- to be a totally dependent cash cow for MS to milk periodically.

PM me your address if you cannot find it and I will send you another one.


I had another boss named Sam, who was computer illiterate but was willing to learn.

He busted his head wide open trying, and he learned how to run a computer and program a spreadsheet.

He got promoted to the home office.




My daughter's school had one very old computer in a lab.

Myself and two other dads installed a second more modern machine that we provided.   One of the other guys would go to all the PTA meetings and tell the other parents that if the kids didn't know computing they were not going anywhere with their education.   He spearheaded a search for a real computer teacher, and we hired one for 3 years who taught the full MS Office suite in depth as his course material.    Students had to buy their own laptops that could run MS Office.

This was my daughter's high school years .......

She now works at IBM/Red Hat writing tech manuals for mainframe Linux systems ......

Before that she designed Link-belt cranes (the big ones) as a project leader ,,,,,,,

She has been a CAD design engineer,  a project team leader and a head technical editor.

No, IBM still makes workstations and mainframes ....... they use a lot of Linux software, so they bought Red Hat up as a product support afterthought.

Red Hat is based in Raleigh, NC where my daughter lives and works (Cary and Raleigh).

Daughter used Ubuntu Linux as her post-apple software "extension" and thought she would apply as a tech writer for Red Hat, as she found one of her old NC State IBM buddies was working there and he hired her on the spot.

Mike, make sure your laptop uses DVDs and not CDs.   DVDs are much higher capacity and that would explain why you can't get stuff to load on your old laptop.    OS software comes on DVDs .......




And no, my daughter got some of her smarts & brains from her Momma and her math and engineering skills from her Daddy.

There was a PC game called TANK that my baby girl and I played on her very first computer.   I used to spot her 2 shots, then one shot, and then we played even.    Before long she could pot me on the very first shot she took, so I got to go first.

There was a variable called wind speed and direction that you could set for your opponent's shooting environment.    I'd turn it up to "hurricane" and she would still pot me on the first shot.   Her instinctive grasp of ballistics and vectors was quite something even at an early age.

Her mother and I taught her how to take multiple guess tests and how to make her instructors happy.   Advanced stuff for a 13-14 year old, but it did her good stead.   Her momma calls it "Playing the Game" and it is a female art form.

She would ask me for help with Algebra, and I taught her the basics of Calculus and derivatives while saying these were some really neat tricks that verged on cheating.    This perked up her interest quite a bit.

I got called to one conference with a Jr. High math teacher who asked his students to write down their steps to solving their math solutions.   He didn't like that I taught Katie how to cancel out problem variables and use Algebra & Calc first derivative equation reductions to simplify his overly complex questions.   He especially didn't like her making up specialty rulers on the edge of her test pages to directly read out the distances in miles on the map geography problems.  (she used these as a recheck method to her mathematical solution, if they disagreed something was done wrong in the math)

My daughter liked Algebra and Trig and Calculus, they were old buddies by the time she got there.

"Katie, you can do anything you can think of to that written problem, just so you do the exact same thing on both sides of the equal sign.   Try to clean up as much junk as you can before you start to crunching the numbers --- makes it easier and cleaner and less likely for you to goof something up."

Her momma taught her to write paragraphs and papers, and how to write it all very well.   She actually made more money as a technical writer as the match up between good math, good engineering skills and good writing skills is a very very very rare thing.

Software Engineers are generally very poor at explaining the complex things they invent.

She would meet with a struggling project group and make some fairly simple suggestions that made the whole thing an easy do ---- that was the simplification tricks I taught her.

The ex-IBM guy who told Red Hat to hire her said she was a Unicorn, she could work magic and she really could do anything.   They became believers after the first six months.

She now gets secondary tasks when a project group falls behind or makes a snarl up out of an assignment.   Sometimes she moves some people who can't get along to another team, sometimes a weak link simply gets dropped if they can't pick up what they need to know to get the job done.

Several years ago she told her upper level bosses they weren't paying her enough to do the work of a middle level system manager, so they promoted her and took away some of her lesser jobs.   She went back to Graduate School at that point for her Masters in Technical Writing and actually became a middle manager at Red Hat.