Trying to help the boy get a new laptop for school. His college has no specific requirements, and all he really needs is something with reliable web access and word processing abilities. He doesn't really game on it. Some of his courses may have online/app components. Nothing that requires the latest graphics, etc. Prior to his freshman year we bought him a cheap HP, which is essentially disposable as far as I can tell. No real ability to upgrade. Its got crap for RAM and a very limited hard drive. At this point he's getting all sorts of issues related to storage and memory. Inability to store new docs, webs sites crashing, multiple tabs causing crashing, etc. Anyway. I don't really understand computers. Still not sure if they're real or just some weird part of the matrix. The boy isn't much more savvy than me. Just looking through Amazon is a bit overwhelming. Pretty much every machine has great reviews and then horrible reviews. In my dinosaur mind, I figure he needs 16 gigs of RAM, and a hard drive of 500+ gigs. He'll need access to the MS office stuff, but I know he can buy a student addition of that separately if needed. Seems like that should get him through the last two years of college without having to buy again or update. So where do I go? Who do I avoid? The easy button would be to hop on Amazon...but again, even well known brands (Lenovo, HP) can have some crap reviews in there. I also want to make sure whatever I buy isn't locked down with some proprietary overloard software that prevents unfettered interaction with the entire computing world... Advice?