>My dad wants me to take him shopping for a laptop this weekend

Install gentoo

How old is he? I got my father-in-law an iPad and it's been great. Very little support required. They even have classes for old people and iOS at the library, community center, etc.

He uses gmail, YouTube, skype, has it connected to his tv for watch movies.

>>60093124

Not terribly old, like mid-60's, but pretty computer-illiterate (the comp currently sitting in his office used to run Windows 98, and it's connected to a dot-matrix printer).

He considered the iPad too, but he decided to go with a more traditional laptop instead. I'm guessing he'd rather have traditional typing functionality.

>>60092895
In seriousness, install Ubuntu or some shit to mitigate malware issues. My grandma uses some old ass version of Red Hat is it works perfectly fine for Facebook, Youtube, and email. She never has problems with her PC.

>take him shopping for a laptop
you never go shopping for a tech piece
you always look them up in online stores and compare prices and specs and buy it there
otherwise you will end up with a $800 1366x768 intel celeron piece of shit

>>60092864
If he is going for porn, make sure he gets a browser that allows add-ons. Adblock saves you a lot of trouble.
Also make sure you buy an external harddrive and let him make a backup weekly.
And learn him some common sence. For instance: don't click the big green download button.

T420 + Install adblock on everything