What to look for when buying a laptop for parents

It's been a year since Mansi gifted her dad with a Dell Inspiron with Ubuntu installed. It's been great so far with no panic calls for viruses or spyware slowing down his laptop. Again bow of the hat to Manas, who tried this experiment first.

So based on my experience, here are some tips when you are searching for a laptop to buy for your non-techie parents:

1. Get a laptop with decent hard disk space and memory. Most of the time, if it's just web browsing and chatting, a Celeron will do. So you can save some money by not opting for a high end Core 2 Duo. I would rather spend money on getting a laptop with a webcam and mic.

2. Choose a brand that has a presence in India. AFAIK, Dell, HP, IBM-Lenovo all are great. But I chose Dell, because I am happy with its customer service.

3. Though it may seem a bit difficult at the beginning for your parents to understand Linux, it will pay off on your time if you select Linux over Windows. For one, they won't click on IE by mistake and unknowingly allow the laptop to be infected by viruses or adware. From my experience, I have seen that once your parents' laptop is infected with either virus or spyware, (i) you end up considerable time finding someone in your neighborhood (in India) to come to your place, look at the laptop and try resolving it. (ii) your parents keep worrying about what virus may affect it next, etc and so on. So to avoid all these issues go for Linux. Select your distro, install it for them (I chose Ubuntu).

If you decide to install Ubuntu, a couple of tips:

1. Install Picasa, so that they can share albums online. Picasa is available by adding Google repos: http://picasa.google.com/linux/thanks-deb.html

2. Install OpenOffice which is in fact a good replacement for MS Office.

3. Something of an option, you could choose to install Dropbox, so that you can share larger files. Dropbox is free and starts with free storage upto 2GB. Dropbox syncs up the files on all laptops with the same account.

4. Skype works like a charm on Linux distros.

5. Install VLC and other video codecs.

6. Last but not the least, set up ssh and vnc on the laptop, so that you can debug and resolve issues online :)

Overall, Linux should be able to provide a worry free User Experience to the older generation :)

Happy Holidays :)