I'm about to purchase and setup a new laptop for my pa-in-law. He's going to be 70, and is ready to move into Powerpoint-land for the talks and lectures he gives.

I've seen some laptops have hd partitions for data/recovery/backup. Is it worth doing that? What are the benefits? How would I do it?

He also wants to work anywhere around the house, rather than just his office, where he has a router with Phone Coop wired to his workstation. Not sure yet whether the router is wireless. If it's not and he only has one Ethernet port, how can I get it so he can work at his kitchen table?

And are there any decent laptop bargains out there at the moment? I'm looking at spending around £350-£400 and will need Office on there. I need to get it to him by his birfday on 7 December, 8 days away.

Thanks.

Personally I wouldn't bother with a partitioned hard drive as a 'back-up' feature. If the hard drive itself packs up you've lost both copies.

If he just wants to backup some Powerpoint presentations I'd suggest either burning to CD/DVD, or getting an external harddrive and backing up to that. (or both).

If he's a wireless router then he'll be laughing with regard to portablility. If not, then it's probably cheap-as-chips to buy him a wireless one. If not I'd recommend a homeplug system – you plug it into the mains and it'll create a network over your mains cabling. Only downside is he'd have to plug in another homeplug device beside him in the kithcen so he'll not be able to wander around, but no problem unplugging it and plugging in again in another room.

Never go wrong with a Dell in my opinion. Maybe not the most exciting.

And just order Office from Amazon or something if they don't bundle it in for a decent price.

Does he need Office? There are plenty of free applications that let you develop slide shows.

What's the free alternative to Poowerpoint for slide shows?

Open Office – free and has it's own presentation product which works perfectly well, especially since he's never used PP

http://www.openoffice.org/

+1 for Open Office

http://openoffice.org is the alternative to MS Office. It is no match to MS Office's latest features however as a freebie it is brilliant.

Open office although the Microsoft products are the best.

I would suggest a USB stick for backing up data. Set up a regular backup and it happens automatically. Just remember to disconnect and put it somewhere safe.

Not a fan of the plug in lan extenders. I would just go for a good wireless router. The coverage should be good and unless he is a long way away or his walls are 4ft thick then he should be fine.

Office 2007 Home and Student, £54, well worth it IMHO.

Amazon Office

i bought one of these toshiba L500 recently and have been very happy with it. the only thing that's not been much good is the built in webcam but there we go. i got a discount code from revoo and it ended up being 350! they also do microsoft office for 69 quid if you're buying a computer with windows 7 on.
windows 7 seems to be pretty good so far.