I plan to buy the Boy a laptop for his 16th birthday. He wants it for "gaming" but he needs it for A levels.
Light for a back pack. Good battery life.
ROBUST 
(=cheap as it will be lost/stolen/destroyed within three months)
CHEAP (see above)
Well? 
(may buy via Amazon 
)
[serious]
What sort of work does he want to do on it? What's your ballpark budget? You can always get better for more £££.
I'd have said get a Win 7 notebook/netbook but you might want to check they're not getting a bit out of fashion.
Not as functionally good as a laptop but loads cheaper and easier to carry around, longer battery life and have a lower area = lower probability of having liquids spilled on them. Will probably need to upgrade the RAM as many come with only 1G. Can struggle if like me you have zillions of windows/tabs open. Is awesome at crunching overcomplex spreadsheets
About £200 new but I got a proper reconditioned one (Asus Eee-PC) for £140 a while back. An Office licence will cost half as much again. I've got far more powerful laptops - in cupboards, they're just too big for comfort - imho.
Tablets etc are good if you don't have to type much in or you trust bluetooth keyboards and you don't need the best Office file interchangeability.
Best I can do. Get others views [/serious]
