Suggest a sub £200 laptop for my eight year old son

[DavidA]

My eight year old son is starting to get into programming, which I'm chuffed to bits about. Unfortunately he likes to use the PC in my office and I'm increasingly working from home. I have a Macbook Air and a Samsung Ultrabook, but they're not really fit for purpose and besides - they're mine!

So I was thinking about getting him a cheap second hand laptop with a decent sized screen. The coding he's doing at the moment is all in Scratch but maybe he'll move to Unity someday so I'd like a bit of a 3D capability. He plays Lego Harry Potter on it too, which states Core Duo ATI HD 2900 or NVIDIA GeForce 8800 as recommended specs.

So... I'm thinking of eBay, used, 15" screen, appropriate CPU and GPU. No need for optical drive.

Any advice?

[jim]

I can't check at the moment because their site is down, but Bigpockets used to do refurbished Thinkpads for well inside your budget.

They're pretty resilient, which would probably suit you down to the ground.

[kompukare]

+1 for used Thinkpads. Tier1 also have some. For that budget they had a fast T400:

http://www.tier1online.com/search.ph...red=&shipping=

Or you can look on ebay for a similar spec. T400 is the one Lenovo used in their storm chasing videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrRzGWNU77k

So well build but even if you get the version with onboard graphics it's going to be max Radeon 3470M. Thing is XT2900 / 8800GT is still 2-4 times faster than even Intel's HD4000 (IB). But I would never recommend a laptop with a hot dGPU: it's just asking for trouble.

[hb904460]

mcscom have quite a range of Dell laptops under £200

http://www.mcscom.co.uk/live/index.p...y&path=266_279

[DavidA]

Thanks all. Liking the look of those Thinkpads. I don't see any T400S on ebay but plenty of T400. Would that suffice?

[kompukare]

Thanks all. Liking the look of those Thinkpads. I don't see any T400S on ebay but plenty of T400. Would that suffice?

T400 and T400s are almost the same. Not sure why Lenovo pushed the s in their how-not-to-treat-a-laptop videos. The 's' basically is a bit slimmer/lighter (still has an optical though), a bit slower (more like the max CPU is less) and has (AFAIK) soldered CPUs.

Oh and judging from that other lenevo video (T400s run over with a truck) it has the HDD mounted differently.

Here are the Thinkwikis:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:T400
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:T400s

[jaff90110]

Um... now a lot of children getting know about the technology. My 3 years old son know how to get into the game on my iphone. I think I should get some very very cheap tablet for him as well.