12 volt TV....

You might find a good deal on a refurbished laptop if you Google laptop advantage . Stay away from IBM's . They require a password to open and if you forget it you might as well throw the laptop away .

 

Dell's refurbished laptops are really good. I used to repair Dells, and I bought my wife a refurb one. They work fine, and they have a good warranty. You'll save several hundred bucks. You can also get a USB TV tuner, which would allow you to watch TV on your computer. You can get a hi-def tuner for less than $100. Between the 'net (www.hulu.com), dvd's, and my archive of old movies stored on my hard drive (I "ripped" my VHS tapes to .avi files), I haven't watched TV for anything other than sports or breaking weather in months.

And - Back up the hard drive!!!!! Hard drives, like trucks, have moving parts. They will fail. You just don't know when. They could last 2 days or 20 years.

The only other advice I have is to get more hard drive than you think you will need, and pony up for the next size up monitor. They are so worth it.

Don't forget to back up the hard drive, you can't count on being able to recover anything.

 

unless im wrong one major thing with a laptop is internet connection. I have a verizon aircard and if you go over 5100 mb a month your looking at .25 cents a mb. i learned that lesson the hard way.

 

air cards use cell towers to set up an internet connection thru your usb port, essentially turning it into a very long range wifi card. from what ive researched, (still a student, so getting one soon), the verizon and at&T cards work the best, with DSL speeds in MOST places. just be wary of the "plan", you could wind up getting wwhacked come bill time due to too much data being used

 

For those concerned about airtime data limits, I've found plan that bypasses that, but I'm a little hesitant to post details without maybe irking some folks around here. Suffice it to say that there is at least one plan out there that will allow you to use your phone as the modem. You can get unlimited data transfer on the phone part, then the phone can be used as the modem, instead of an air card. Then you connect the phone to the laptop and surf away. There is a charge for this, in my case it's $45 per month over the voice plan. It is worth it to me personally, your mileage may vary.

No, I'm not gonna share, but call your provider and see if they have the phone as modem option. It'll save a lot in the long run, even if you have to change providers.

 

why would you irk anyone? please give me more info, it would save me alot. explain how it works because i doubt highly verizon will want to save me any money what so ever.

 

You can name the company. That's not against the rules.

 

I know its not verizon, i dont think there is a way to use your phone as a modem with unlimited bandwidth usage. I doubt it highly.