Q: I'm going into my freshman year of high school, and my brother is going into his junior and i was going to ask my parents for a laptop because our high school is competitive with A LOT of writing assignment and i will have three paper a week at least. so I'm looking for and inexpensive laptop under $400 dollars that has what i need, word documents, excel, internet (duh), printer connection etc. and my parents know about all the work for highschool but they're not completly convinced, any tips on how to convince them money is also tight so is there any ways to save on the laptop (sales, etc)
A: A few months ago I found a Dell Vostro 1000 laptop at outlet.dell.com for $348 including shipping: 1.8GHz Sempron, 60GB HD, 512MB RAM, 15" widescreen display and wireless card. I added 1GB RAM from oempcworld for ~$35 and wiped the hard drive and installed Linux Mint, which includes OpenOffice for Word and Excel compatibility. My wife loves this system and it's been holding up quite well. Dell doesn't often have Vostro laptops under $400 on their outlet site, but they do show up now and then, especially very late at night - keep checking.