Greetings technology board.
My mother's 6 year old mac laptop has recently broken, and so we're on the market for a replacement. She's a bit technology illiterate, so she prefers Mac, but I think this would be a good opportunity to shift her onto Windows. Does anybody know of any good, affordable laptops? It doesn't need to do much, just run adobe applications ect.
Any recommendations would be appreciated.

Where do you live ?

And if you're looking for cheap stuff, you can look for a PC with Ubuntu. I won't be difficult to use _it's more like Windows than Linux, and it will run all the web application, plus the major open source programs, and it's absolutely free.

What is broken exactly ? If that's the RAM or the hard drive or something like this it will be easier to repair her PC than to buy a new one.

>>2 Australia, so technology is always going to be expensive to some extent. I'll have a look into Ubuntu with her, thanks.

>>3 It's a late 2009 mac laptop that can barely run safari and word at the same time. A glass of water was spilt on its keyboard in quite a drastic manner. It isn't really worth the fix.

I recommend you not to buy a too cheap computer neither.

It would be better to have a comfortable and time-proof PC. All the more since your mother got used to an upmarket Mac laptop.

For example, despite the fact that reflexion-free screens, illuminated keyboards and bluetooth cards are more expensive, they're often useful and worthwhile features.

And the more your PC has processing power and quality components, the more it will be able to run today's and tomorrow's programs fluidly, without the necessity to replace parts.

I began to search for one computer for your mother, and I can tell you that they don't seem that expensive in Australia.

The only odd point, is that it seems they're are really few low end PCs.

Well I'm using a surface pro 3, It's pretty good for business stuff, pretty light, pretty fast, keyboard lights up, detachable. It comes with a high quality touch pen too, really really accurate.

The few flaws it has is sometimes when you switch it on you can't go onto Google Chrome straight away otherwise it'll crash. Also since this is a business laptop it doesn't always sit nicely on your lap, so I'd recommend to get it's cover for it. The control keys are something you'd have to learn through research but it's cool once you figure it out. And you have to make sure you constantly update everything...i mean constantly otherwise sometimes the keyboard won't respond until you've attached and detached it a few times, gets really annoying. Another thing is I wouldn't recommend playing games with it, it doesn't do so well...

I'm from Australia too and the cost was well within $1000, if i were to try and remember i think it was $1038 at Officework and JB-hi fi. If you want a cheaper version of it there is one with less GBs (less memory dunno the terms) and drops a few hundred off its price.

I rate this laptop a 7/10, there are probably more suitable ones, just depends how your mum wants to go about using it.

You should check Asus' website as their laptops have incredibly good build quality and have a very good power to cost ratio which is exactly what you need, the range of devices is good enough for you to get what you need to do what you want. There are their new Zenbooks which are MacBook esque sort of industrial design which is probably more familiar and if she really does not like using windows you can always install hackintosh onto it so she can use Mac OS X again. A lot of people do this productivity wise to use their souped up hardware on Apple's hardware. However there are probably more cost effective choices from Gigabyte MSI etc.