Looking for a touchscreen laptop durable enough for the family.

[Scrapntam]

I am looking for a reasonably priced touchscreen laptop for the family. Has to have DVD drive for homeschool work. Also would be used for word processing, videos, surfing the web and Minecraft. At the same time I am in the market for a personal computer to use in writing a book, checking email, storing large amounts of files for my home based business and also would use for photo storing and editing. Is a tablet out of the question? I need a comfortable and hunky functional keyboard.

 

[Scrapntam]

*hunky functional keyboard was supposed to read fairly functional. My iPhone keyboard obviously isn't as functional as I would like.

 

[Groudon12321]

http/www.amazon.com/HP-Pavilion-Touchsmart-Touchscreen-generation/dp/B00H0BQJY8/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1390448187&sr=1-3&keywords=touchscreen+laptop+i5
This seems like a decent laptop for the criteria you listed, the minecraft requirement however jacked up the price since it is a cpu heavy game. I am no expert in laptops, but that seems like a fairly good deal on a laptop with an i5 cpu.

For the personal computer are you looking for a desktop or a laptop? And for the keyboard, do you have a preference between mechanical and silicon-dome based keyboards?

 

[Scrapntam]

For the personal computer....Definitely something very portable so I can take with me and write on the go. That is why I considered something smaller like a notebook but have heard the keyboards are too small for extensive typing. Sorry to say, I don't know the difference between the keyboard types you mentioned. Our current laptop which is dying a slow, painful death, is a Dell Inspiron and the keys are fine. Not sure which category they would fall into. I am definitely hoping for a backlit keyboard, I do know that.

 

[Groudon12321]

Ah, okay. The tablets are very lightweight and portable (my sister has one) but the keyboards are a pain to type on for awhile, it just isn't ergonomic like a full keyboard. Honestly I don't do extensive typing, but full sized laptops with large keyboards tend to work best for me. If you need a large storage space then I would get an external drive (flash, hard disk drive, solid state drive, etc...) as long as you don't loose it, you can access the data on any computer. As for the computer itself, I would go to stores such as micro center or best buy and try out the keyboards on different computers, like the ones on display, as that would give you a good feel for what you want. If it is a work computer used mostly for writing than i wouldn't worry about having the most amazing specs, but don't settle with something so slow that it would get in the way.

 

[LummusMaximus]

In terms of specific systems, a good work laptop would be a Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga. You can move the keyboard so it's either a laptop or a very bulky tablet, and the Lenovo laptops are known as good business machines, and they are also known for great keyboards- very comfortable.

 

[jaguarskx]

I suggest you go to Bestbuy and try out different size laptops just to get a feel for how crapped the keyboard feels when you try to use it. Not sure if they carry any powerful enough laptops below 13.3" though. For me I generally find the keyboard on 14" laptops to be fine. I never used anything smaller or bigger.

Keep in mind that 12.5" - 13.3" laptops tends to be rather expensive because many people want high performance and portability and it is usually these laptops that fit the bill. I suppose you can even go down to the 10.6" MS Surface Pro 2 but the base model starts at $900 with only 64GB of storage and the keyboard (touch or tactile) is sold separately. I think the most storage is a 256GB version which generally sells for $1,300. But that's likely to be much more than you are willing to spend.

 

[LummusMaximus]

The Surface Pro 2 goes up to 512GB, at around $1600. The keyboards are around $140 and sold seperately, and I know from experience the touch one wears out quickly.