I recently purchased a new laptop for my wife and child to use. I got a Toshiba P55t-A5116. It set me back about $800 after taxes at Best Buy. Now I see a blue screen of death with 0xc0000185. A Google revealed that it is probably a hardware problem with the CD or hard drive.
I will see if Toshiba will warranty it. I could not get into the BIOS and disable the CD. The ability to disable the CD was grayed out.
Before the laptop died, I noticed how my wife did not use the whole 1080 resolution. She had it set to something around 720 and claimed it helped her see it. Of course I explained how to make things bigger without changing the resolution, but that just irritated her.
She also hates the touchscreen. She can not stand how our child gets fingerprints on it. The back lit keyboard is too difficult to understand because it requires pressing a FN button.
If Toshiba does not warranty the machine, I have decided to purchase the Celeron model for around $230. It uses 720 resolution and there is no touch screen or back lit junk to confuse the wife.
The reason I bought such an expensive one in the first place is because she used her old cheap laptop for years. Now I fully understand that a cheap machine is more than she needs. She only does one thing at a time. She does not run virtual machines. She does not do high end video games. All she does is surf the internet, email, and occasionally use MS office products. I purchased my wife more machine than she needed.
At work, I have a laptop connected to a docking station. It has 8 GB of ram. I can easily make it run out of memory by running two virtual machines along with the software the company uses to communicate with the remote Linux machines I work on. The corporate spyware also runs on it to help slow it down and eat memory.
The slowness and constrained resources of that laptop encouraged me to build a powerful Core i7 with 32 GB of ram, an SSD, and an Nvidia graphics card. Now I live in the 64 bit world here at home. I was able to make the PC use about 14 GB once by running multiple VMs, a couple videos, and some other stuff. That was the most ram I was ever capable of making it use.
I have more machine than I really need here at home. I wonder how many other folks have more than they need.