I took my oldest daughter shopping for a new laptop last Thursday, as her old Compaq laptop is on its last legs. She's a married graduate student who often commutes to school and work on the T (Boston's subway system), so she wanted something that would be light and fit into her satchel. She uses her computers for email, Web browsing, and storing her music library, as well as to write pa I took my oldest daughter shopping for a new laptop last Thursday, as her old Compaq laptop is on its last legs. She’s a married graduate student who often commutes to school and work on the T (Boston’s subway system), so she wanted something that would be light and fit into her satchel. She uses her computers for email, Web browsing, and storing her music library, as well as to write papers, prepare presentations, design Web surveys, and to analyze big data sets with SPSS. Clearly, she needed plenty of RAM and disk space. She doesn’t care much about using her laptop for gaming or entertainment: my son-in-law has the games installed on his laptop, and they have a DVD player and a TiVo box connected to their TV. She had a budget of $1,000.We decided to start at Best Buy, since they’ve been advertising heavily in the local papers. I picked out half a dozen interesting models for her, after eliminating the junky units that could barely run Windows Vista Home Basic and the units that were out of her price range, and she narrowed them down to two or three candidates. I felt that she should test the models out herself before she bought one, but the laptops were all locked down and running demo software, so we went looking for sales help.The sales help at Best Buy couldn’t be bothered to talk to us, so after a while we walked out. CompUSA was just across the parking lot, so we went there, even though there has recently been speculation in the press that they’re having trouble competing with the big box stores. We found a much larger selection of laptops at CompUSA than we’d seen at Best Buy. We also found plenty of sales help in the computer department, who waited until we were ready to talk to them, and then helped us without pushing too hard. There was also a Sony salesman in the store, who explained the Vaio product line and showed us how Sony laptops are better constructed than HP, Toshiba, and Acer laptops. He was fairly convincing. However, the model he recommended to my daughter not only was out of her price range, it wasn’t yet in stock at that CompUSA store, and she wanted to go home with a new laptop rather than order one and wait. I was amused that he broke the first rule of technology sales: “Never sell tomorrow’s product.”My daughter wasn’t interested in looking at a Mac, even after I explained about Boot Camp and Parallels. She wasn’t especially impressed with the Acer or Toshiba laptops, and started leaning towards HP when I explained that HP and Compaq had merged. Ultimately, she went home with a 5.4 pound laptop made by HP that has a reasonably high-end AMD dual-core mobile processor, 2 GB of RAM, 160 GB of disk space, and a 14.1″ 1280×800 screen, running Windows Vista Business. She also picked up a 4 GB thumb drive, which I’m hoping will be fast enough to use for ReadyBoost; if not, she and her husband will still be able to use it to carry big files back and forth to work. After rebates, she pretty much hit her budget. I’m pretty sure it’ll meet her needs for at least the next three years.I really hope that CompUSA can stay afloat. I do a lot of my computer buying online or at small local white-box shops, but for someone like my daughter CompUSA offers just about the right selection and a palatable sales experience. Software Development