Computer for the aging 'rents in your life

[punkncat]

I am needing to replace the laptop my mother has been using. It is a very old and very low end AMD A-series laptop from a long while ago.

One of the biggest factors in her online experience is that her access is SUPER slow. I mean like can't watch YouTube or other streaming services there slow. I attempted to hook her up with a Fire Stick a couple of years ago and it will not work due to the internet speed. If it weren't for her ISP discontinuing it, she would be perfectly happy using dial up to this day.

I have been putting some thought into this purchase and am pretty set that I am going to look for something refurbished or used. I am very much on the fence about updating her to W11, although at the same time I have concerns about the security of W10 moving forward when I won't be there as often as I like to check on things and make sure the device is secure. This is compounded by the fact that she has a very minimal grasp on the OS in general and any time any manner of notification or somesuch pops up it is a "serious" issue in her mind. I have even contemplated doing some manner of Linux build for this.

It is worth noting that I have kept older but updated desktop PC there in good working order. She doesn't want to go upstairs to use it, in spite of being worlds more powerful than the laptop.

Her use case is to surf and do a bit of shopping, news consumption, and once a year she does her taxes on it online with access to the wireless printer (that has been unused for so long I will probably have to reconnect it on Thanksgiving).

What manner of devices and mitigations have you used to help your aging parents wade through the modern online world?
My thoughts are on a used laptop, probably something Intel i5-ish, newer than 8th gen with a big screen and full size keyboard.

 

[jeremyj_83]

If all she is doing is email and web surfing I'd look at a Chromebook. You can get a nice one for pretty cheap.

 

[hotaru.hino]

I'd argue a tablet would be a viable alternative too. And if they need a physical keyboard, you can always get a BT one connected to it.

 

[punkncat]

I'd argue a tablet would be a viable alternative too. And if they need a physical keyboard, you can always get a BT one connected to it.

This was actually a protracted conversation in regard to this. She got an Apple phone many moons ago and it stuck to a degree that she now buys Apple phones as she is familiar with them. She is about to purchase another new one, for whatever that is worth. (I don't care for Apple, but not the focus of this discussion). I suggested that perhaps she might like one of the new nice iPad variants.

Her reply was that she wants a "real computer" with a keyboard that she can do work with. I can't argue that.

 

[jeremyj_83]

Her reply was that she wants a "real computer" with a keyboard that she can do work with. I can't argue that.

Go with a Chromebook then.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Her reply was that she wants a "real computer" with a keyboard that she can do work with. I can't argue that.

If her only requirement of a "real computer" is a keyboard, again, you can hook up one. If she needs a mouse, you can have one of those too. The use cases you described are things you can do on a tablet.

But if she's dead set on something not a tablet, then I would say don't get a used laptop. Even something around the $700 can get you something pretty decent especially this time of year. But if your budget's a little thin, then I'd have to ask if it has to be a laptop. Because if it doesn't, Amazon has plenty of vendors selling refurbished office computers for dirt cheap. I picked up an SFF Optiplex with an i3-8100T, 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD with Windows installed for $160 and it came with basic a keyboard and mouse.

 

[jeremyj_83]

For under $400 you can get some really nice Chromebooks. They keep themselves updated, have a lightweight OS, usually good battery life, and assuming all you need is either online or in the Chrome App Store they are great. Here are some with 14" monitors.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-14-2-in-1-chromebook-plus-laptop-amd-ryzen-3-7320c-8gb-memory-128gb-ssd-ponder-blue/6553121.p?skuId=6553121

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lenovo-ideapad-flex-5i-chromebook-plus-laptop-14-2k-touch-intel-i3-1315u-with-8gb-memory-intel-uhd-graphics-128gb-ssd-storm-grey/6550736.p?skuId=6550736

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/hp-2-in-1-14-wide-ultra-xga-touch-screen-chromebook-plus-laptop-intel-core-i3-8gb-memory-256gb-ssd-mineral-silver/6550194.p?skuId=6550194

All have 1080p or higher resolution screens, 8GB RAM (which is plenty for most things in Chrome OS), 128 or 256GB SSD, and CPUs with 8+ threads.

If a 16" screen is desired here is one other idea for a little more money.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/acer-chromebook-516-ge-cloud-gaming-laptop-16-2560x1600-120hz-intel-core-i5-1240p-8gb-ram-256gb-ssd-rgb-kb-titanium-gray/6516347.p?skuId=6516347

This has a 1600p screen, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, and a faster CPU.

The fact that everything she does is online and you can connect a printer to a Chromebook makes it easy IMO.

 

[punkncat]

But if she's dead set on something not a tablet, then I would say don't get a used laptop. Even something around the $700 can get you something pretty decent especially this time of year. But if your budget's a little thin, then I'd have to ask if it has to be a laptop. Because if it doesn't, Amazon has plenty of vendors selling refurbished office computers for dirt cheap. I picked up an SFF Optiplex with an i3-8100T, 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD with Windows installed for $160 and it came with basic a keyboard and mouse.

As mentioned above, she has a rather nice older PC on hand. It is also an Optiplex, 4th gen i5, 32GB of RAM and an SSD. She just won't walk up there to use it. Otherwise, I really don't know why she is against having a tablet since an iPad would be essentially just like her phone.
Sometimes you can't really question why your parent gets dead set on something like this, but I can't really question it. If I get her something she doesn't want it will just sit there, so no point in that.

Even at that, the reason I don't want to find a new one is that it is just going to sit there on a chair 99% of the time with the charger laying on top and a battery going bad. IF she were to find out that I paid more than a few hundred for this 'gift' she wouldn't use it because it was "too expensive" and so on.

 

[COLGeek]

As bad as I hate to go near a Best Buy this time of year, it might be time to make a visit to see what she might like.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Even at that, the reason I don't want to find a new one is that it is just going to sit there on a chair 99% of the time with the charger laying on top and a battery going bad. IF she were to find out that I paid more than a few hundred for this 'gift' she wouldn't use it because it was "too expensive" and so on.

But does it have to be a laptop? I'm not getting that from your post.

 

[punkncat]

But does it have to be a laptop? I'm not getting that from your post.

Oh, I thought I was being pretty clear about that aspect. She has a completely working and workable PC sitting at her desk upstairs that she doesn't use. She doesn't want a tablet in spite of my own opinion and has been pointed out here as well that it would be the perfect bit of hardware for her.

It may be worthwhile as COLGeek mentions just to go by a retailer and see what she likes, what draws her in.

 

[punkncat]

Well, I folded upon seeing a fairly good price on a refurbished Acer Aspire 3. Its got W11H, a R5 7xxx on the budget end, 8GB of RAM, and an NVMe SSD. We will see how this worked out sub $275

 

[Grobe]

It is a very old and very low end AMD A-series laptop from a long while ago.

Do you happens to know the model name and specifications of this one?

I have even contemplated doing some manner of Linux build for this.

Well, then you have an OS that doesn't tend to spam the users with unnecessary messages. If you give me some more data about this then I may give some advises.

human factor
However, I have relatives myself that isn't tech-savvy, and trying to push something new and unfamiliar onto them may cause a lot of noise. Thing about close relatives is you may be doing comprehensive training to a space program, but still hesitated to allow you to fire up a simple rocket at new years eve - metaphoric speaking.
Have several family members that somehow never will learn when to ask for help, and always seems to end up buying product that cost like triple of what they actually need for relatively simple tasks.
The worst is those have no idea how a computer works. You can be as helpful and spend much of your free time, but still get blamed when the person you trying to help doesn't want to learn nor understand. Then sadly the best (and probably only) thing you can do is to send them to a regular electronics marked and just let it play out by itself without your intervention.

so then
This should be fine - if the old laptop meets some minimum requirements, you're capable to maintain a Linux OS, and assure your mother you're competent and you're agreed about this (cost nothing if the old laptop isn't too old)...

 

[punkncat]

I don't have the older laptop in hand until tomorrow. I have to look it over to see why my mother can't access her email account any more. As mentioned above, I found her something newer and far more powerful but still within a budget range she will tolerate, if you catch my meaning.

Mom worked for an entity that when any manner of anything was wrong, she made a phone call and a tech came and fixed it post haste. She knows nothing at all about the hardware aspect beyond turn it on and it should work. We have been working on spotting fake and even harmful pop ups and emails. Most of the time, if anything even seeming off happens she yanks the power and battery and calls me.

It is my hope that the more modern and powerful CPU and capability of this new refurb will help mitigate that simply by being fast enough to keep up. I will, as traditional, set it up, set her up a standard user account with UAC on high, and go from there.

My thoughts about going Linux are that I probably am not ready for that. I have been working with Ubuntu and its lite version for about the past year and a half or so on the side/spare time kind of thing. In spite of the tremendous support within the community, my own fear is that I don't know enough about how to fix what she could do and not know exactly what it was. I know enough about Windows to at least be dangerous to myself and have gotten pretty good at reformatting and restoring if all else fails.

I very much appreciate your willingness to help and offer an out of the box solution.

 

[bill001g]

There are a large number of those nucbox computers being sold for under $200 on amazon. Some even come with a windows preinstalled. A friend of mine has one taped to the back of his kids monitor. Seems to work fine for even very simple games. Since most are dual ethernet I have been thinking of getting one just to play with as a firewall.

 

[Colif]

My mum needs a new pc but then she wouldn't listen to me, I don't know anything about computers...

She more likely to listen to my brother but he always too busy. There are a number of things I want him to buy with her. PC is just one. She complains its slow and then doesn't do anything about it.

 

[punkncat]

There are a large number of those nucbox computers being sold for under $200 on amazon. Some even come with a windows preinstalled. A friend of mine has one taped to the back of his kids monitor. Seems to work fine for even very simple games. Since most are dual ethernet I have been thinking of getting one just to play with as a firewall.

A buddy of mines uses these fairly extensively as HTPC detail alongside an external drive standing up some audio/video. They are quite elegant.

 

[punkncat]

I have to laugh a little here....was down at mom's house today and she asked me to take a look at her 'broken' laptop. The only thing wrong was she hasn't turned it on since April. Both Windows and Google had logged her off this machine and she wasn't scrolling the 2 clicks down the page where it says "yes, it's me"

The laptop is in as good shape as it could be. I forgot to get the model number but it is on what was probably the cheapest A8 mobile platform at the time of purchase, had a HDD at that time, and also has 4GB of soldered RAM and removed second slot. It is struggling for sure.

 

[punkncat]

A few comments about the recently purchased laptop.

This is the Acer Aspire 3 15.6" laptop. It has a Ryzen 5 7520U with the integrated Radeon 610M graphics, 8GB of LPDDR5-5500, 512GB NVMe SSD, and Windows 11 Home version.

First impressions are nice. The laptop is a dusky blue grey color. It is 'sleek' if not so 'thin', it looks and feels like what some of the thinner models some years ago did. It is not at all light considering the size of it. The exterior is understated to a degree. There is a significantly sized intake/cooling grill along the bottom where you can see the cooler fan as well as the copper transfer. There are a small section of exhaust venting at the back right. Power, USB C, HDMI, USB on the left side and LED indicators, combo audio, USB, and Kensington lock on the right.

The hinge will not open one handed, at least not yet. The screen is impressive at 15.6". The coating is sort of a matte finish but still is a bit reflective. There is a webcam with no privacy screen. The speakers for this unit are under the front edge. It has a very large touchpad and a full sized-ish keyboard with numeric keys.

The power button on this unit is the uppermost right key. It has no tactile feel or does this unit have a lit keypad. You have to look at the LED indicators along the right side to see if it registered turning on. It is a really poor application for such an important feature. The 1080 screen looks quite nice. It is vivid and bright and is a touchscreen. The touchpad is wonderful. It is big and responds well to taps and gestures. I suppose this is the offset for the absolutely terrible keyboard. The key strokes are short and mushy and the keys don't feel good under your fingers at all.

It is important to note here that the CPU in this unit, the R5 7520U is a very low power 15W TDP with 4C8T . It runs up to ~4.3 GHz on paper, but my own use has shown it to go to around 4.1. The cooling fan for this unit is very audible. Not like desktop gaming kind of drone sound, but certainly noticeable if the room is quiet. In spite of that, even when it gets quite warm, the housing and exhaust air are never notably hot. IMO the weight of the unit would be more of a detractor from keeping it in your lap than the heat of the chassis.

This unit is a certified factory Refurb, and in this I found some interesting omissions. The OS install on this is the factory bloat packed version. It has all the standard Acer branded crap doing the same thing as built in programs in Windows running right on top. There are several of the different stock offerings that cannot be changed or deleted. For instance, there is an Amazon listing in the Start Menu that just opens an Edge webpage to Amazon. There is a similar thing for Forge of Empires. Can't delete them.
It very much appears that all the refurbisher did was to load the factory image right back on it and sent it out the door. They did not take the time to install more than the very basic drivers that would come with the W11 (early) install process.

What this accomplishes is that when you take this out of the box, get it set up and connected to the internet it has very few of the drivers the system needs to run optimally. While you are trying to get your initial setup done, in the background Windows Update is absolutely going ham trying to get all the missing drivers. The experience is absolutely horrid, and in that I would surmise that it was the specific reason why they have so many of these available as a refurb unit. Aside from the fact that it is a roughly $500 laptop (new) which by no means suggests much if any luxury, for someone that didn't know better and give it a couple of hours to catch everything up, it seems a lot like something is wrong with the unit. Even so far as having display artifacts, slow response, just a really bad experience up front.

It actually runs pretty well once all this is done. You have to keep in mind that this is a very low power unit, so even calling it a Ryzen 5 is more of a marketing thing IMO than really to be comparable. The single biggest fault I can find is relating back to the power button and the severe lack of lighting on the unit to indicate it is on or off, working, etc. When doing long updates the unit would appear completely powered down for 60-90 seconds, even longer. Real easy to go smashing on the power button and trying to figure out what is going on, when really you just have no indication that anything is happening at all.

All in all, for the price point and the use case it is a workable value option, but overall was a pretty poor application of said in that if nothing else a separate power button with some feel and a light could have gone a long way.

Edit- a couple of other items worth mentioning. The speakers are really poor. Luckily, the unit has a headphone jack as well as Bluetooth, so you have options for even decent sound.
The other is the suggestion to take this out of the box, verify operation, then wipe and clean install an updated USB installer. The stock install is so bloated and full of crud that there is little reason to consider keeping it in place.

 

[Order 66]

My mum needs a new pc but then she wouldn't listen to me, I don't know anything about computers...

She more likely to listen to my brother but he always too busy. There are a number of things I want him to buy with her. PC is just one. She complains its slow and then doesn't do anything about it.

sounds like my mom with our internet. She complains that her internet is slow and tries to get others in the house to disconnect their devices, but she doesn't want to get faster internet even though it is available.