Laptop purchase help

[wolfe70]

Laptop purchase help

Got a friend who needs to buy a laptop for their son who's going to college.

Will be using Office and downloading music, I'm sure.

They don't have big bucks so I'm thinking $1000 or less.

Any brand you would recommend? Any you wouldn't?

They don't want to do the "over the Internet" thing so Dell is out.

Also, Can you still buy w/ XP or is everthing Vista now?

[jdc2000]

You can still get laptops with XP Pro, but you will have to either order them from the manufacturer's site via the internet or see if a local store will special order one for you.

[SpywareDr]

If you have a CompUSA near you, it looks like they still has a few XP laptops:

http://www.compusa.com/specials/sale...=3124&pfp=jul1

[rbc1100]

I have a HP laptop with a AMD dual core cpu and 2 gigs of ram and a 120 gig HD. It has Vista installed on it now but it came with XP media Center. I like it. It runs vista quite well. i bought it for under a grand. So far its been stable and I have had no problems. You can still find a few with XP, but as the other posters have stated you may have to order factory direct to get XP. (choke) ugh Wallmart now sells Dell systems. hard to say if they have laptops yet but they have desktops.

[wolfe70]

Thanks for the posts.