[geeks] Good Laptop for Small Biz?

[Nathan Raymond]

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 12:09 PM, William Barnett-Lewis <wlewisiii at gmail.com
> wrote:

> I have a friend running his small used bookstore on a refurb Dell
> Laptop. He's starting to wonder "what if" for when it goes down. It
> needs to be windows based due to a custom app built on access (yes, I
> know, but it does what he needs done quite well.).
>
> So which company is pure best? And which is best bang for buck? If it
> were me, I'd buy a Mac and run Windows under VirtualBox or the like
> but he did that in the past and doesn't want to again.
>
> Tips, thoughts & suggestions appreciated.
>

Doesn't sound like his requirements are significant.  More important than
what laptop he gets, is what backup is he using?  I would highly recommend
CrashPlan with a local target (external USB drive for instance) and a cloud
target.  Their 'unlimited' plan (which is actually up to 4TB of data
stored) runs about $10/month/machine.  Comparison of plans here:

http://www.crashplan.com/business/compare.html

After that, choose the best Dell or Lenovo laptop for the user's cost
bracket, and I'd recommend a 3-year next business day onsite warranty.
 Note that Lenovo will auto-bundle their accidental damage warranty with
their next-business day warranty in most cases, so the way to get just the
next-business day warranty for 3 years is to order it with the 1-year
without accidental damage and then extended it for another 2 years (at
least that's how you'd do it through resellers, and maybe direct through
Lenovo sales as well).

- Nate