Ask Slashdot: what laptop to buy for my first employee ?

vikingpower writes: Until now, yours truly has been running as a one-man freelancer show. However, since January 1 the first employee is here, and of course I'm mighty proud of a stellarly clever young person working for me. She works remote (I'm in one European capital, she in another), and I need to buy her a laptop. That's a bit of a puzzle: as she's straight out of university and a non-techie, she basically only knows one OS: Windows, although she could get comfortable with Mac OS. However, as a long-time (server-side) programmer, I feel Apple hardware is seriously over-priced. Also, my brilliant firstemployee will mostly do research, and hardly needs anything more than a browser, Office or Office-like software (yes, I'm looking at you, Libre Office, and I love you!), and bibliography software. Should I get her a Chromebook ? A mid-level laptop with ye standarde OEM Windows installation ? Any thoughts ?

Things to consider

[AmiMoJo]

You want something low maintenance and with on-site support if it needs anything doing to it. A Chromebook will be cheap and generally "just works", although there is no LibreOffice (you can use Google Docs) and crucially no on-site support. Having said if you use a Google account with it everything is synced and stored in the cloud, so if it breaks you can buy a replacement with next day shipping, log in and pretty much continue immediately.

The other option I'd suggest is a Lenovo or maybe Dell/HP business

Re:

[Zocalo]

+1 on this. If she's familiar with Windows, then stick with that and keep it easy for her. Presumably you've got an idea of how much data she'll be saving to disk and how much number crunching is required, so assign a budget that you can afford and then balance SSD (seems like you might as well go for performance rather than space)/memory/CPU accordingly so it falls within that with enough left over for a suitable support contract on-top. OEM MS Office bought with a PC from one of the big box-shifters is