Sarah's Crappy Laptop

This year, our brilliant school board here decided to purchase laptop computers for all the incoming freshmen for use at school. I have heard that the total price tag was around $65K.  So far that price, I would think that they would have gotten at least some decent units.  Sadly, that isn't the case.

Sarah has a Lenovo laptop, and I have to say I hate it!  She had to do a project for her English class where she needed to make a movie/video and upload it to youtube.  Then they would watch everyone's videos in class and critique.  I remember when she got it, which was about a month into the school year, and for some reason I wasn't able to install our wireless printer on it.  They only got a fixed number of restarts (I think it was four) before everything locked down.  So I never got it installed, which gets to be a problem when she needs to print a paper or something.  But back to the point.  

A couple of weeks ago, I was trying to help Sarah with her project.  The program that she had installed on it wasn't saving the file in the correct format, so I had to convert it.  Which wouldn't have been that much of a problem, but the touchpad was so sensitive it kept clicking on things I didn't want it to click on as I was scrolling through menus.  I was ready to throw the thing against the wall.  I asked Sarah if I could adjust her touchpad settings and she said it didn't matter because as soon as she restarted everything reset, that is just the way it works.  And that happens now because it crashed on her about a month ago where she had to take it to whoever the guy is at the high school who handles those kinds of problems, and he had to reset, or reinstall something.  I forget exactly what Sarah said he did.  Whatever it was it just sucked.  So then, after many attempts, I finally got it fixed for her and ready to upload to youtube, which then took something like 5 hours.

All in all I have to say I HATE when I need to help her with her school work.  I told Kris we should just buy her one for school and have her turn in the one they gave her.  Then I could pick the brand, features, put on the software that would work best, etc.  This is just an example of what happens when you allow the government to be in charge of things for you.