ARSE parents - bring your own device to school

[smithcorp]

Hi all

I imagine some of you have kids old enough to start bringing laptops to school. My daughter's school is doing this. They have some pool Chromebooks but encourage/allow kids to bring devices from home. She has been taking the laptop I bought from Dex 4 years ago, but is complaining its slow and the battery runs out too quickly (I've done my best to optimise it, but its a Sony Vaio loaded with Sony crap you can't delete or disable, and it is painfully slow by modern standards).

Appreciate any suggestions from folk here about suitable/recommended devices. I can get a Chromebook for less than $400 and am leaning towards that, but interested in alternatives (she couldn't play the Minecraft on the Chromebook).

smiss

[richo]

Both my kids have Macbook Air's , One is "supplied" by the school and the other we bought . Both schools are very Macentric so no choice as to what to get.

Better check out what the school uses as I know of two people that bought Mac's only to find the school is WIndows exclusive

[DexterPunk]

Wow! Forgot about that Sony. Good to hear it's still going (sort of).

I wonder if you could upgrade to windows 10, make a media creation tool USB bootable version. And install a fresh copy of 10 with no Sony rubbish on there.

You could always buy an SSD for it... The speed difference would be huge. More than enough for school work. Battery life would likely increase as well, as an SSD doesn't require as much grunt as a mechanical HDD. Unfortunately though, laptop batteries will eventually die. And it would be hard to replace one of that computer i'd imagine. It's probably propriety.

I've been out of JB too long to really give any good advise on where to go with the next purchase. Chromebooks definitely had their drawbacks from memory though, perhaps things have changed. No MS Office programs? Sometimes limited storage with their apps wanting to use a lot of cloud based computing. Fine if you always have WiFi available. Might be limiting if you take it on holidays and your daughter wants to do some work.

Actually I'm probably forgetting what it's like be a kid... I would never have done school work when on holidays!

richo - Could those two people have put windows on the macs? I run win7 on my air. Runs brilliantly.

[smithcorp]

Cheers Dex - that lappy is about 5 years old now! That's like dog years. I reckon I'll get her something like this: http://www.dicksmith.com.au/laptops-not ... sau-xc9362 Aim for it to last 2 years. Should be adequate and her school seems to support all the cloud stuff. All her school work is upped to their cloud.