Looking for Laptop Advice, Suggestions and Warnings

As most of you may know my dad has been placed in a long term care facility, a.k.a. a nursing home. He's got his issues, and really hates being forced to leave his room for mandatory fun group activities. Since that's my own inclination, I can't really fault him for that. But we want to encourage him to remain at least mentally active.

Watching Sponge Bob does not meet that standard, IMNSHO.

Similarly, he's unwilling to go to the shared computer on the unit. Considering he's got mobility issues, too, that's not all that surprising to me.

But it leaves us with a couple of concerns. First and foremost is the mental activity one I'd mentioned. A very close second is my recently arrived niephling. (Well, okay, she's my niece, I just prefer the term niephling.) My sister and brother-in-law have set up a very nice blogging website to allow interested family to check up on what's going on with her. And my dad either can't, or won't, remember the passwords he needs to access it.

So, we're considering getting him a laptop for use in the nursing home.

What I want is something with a decent sized screen, reasonably lightweight (I imagine it's going to be hard to find a laptop that's much over 6 lbs these days.), and suitable for general web surfing, some word processing, and the ability to play the occasional streaming video. My sister has also mentioned she'd like to have something with an integrated webcam capability - but considering we'd be planning to have the laptop hooking into the internet with a community WiFi, I'm not so sure that we'd have the bandwidth to use that effectively - but I don't know. I know next to nothing about webcams.

I'm interesting in hearing what anyone might have to say about what sort of machine we should consider, and any concerns we should look out for.

Also, I'd be very interested in hearing any suggestions for theft protection or deterrent schemes. So far the best I can think of is to use an enamel International Orange Paint to have his name on the cover.

Pretty much everything you can buy new today should meet your basic requirements. While webcams aren't universal, they are frequent enough. I think there are two decisions to make:

1. What do you consider a decent sized screen? That's a good starting point for narrowing it down.

2. Do you want an optical drive? Many of the more mobility-oriented notebooks these days don't have one. If the notebook is supposed double as entertainment system you probably want one.

Well, to me, decent sized is probably going to be as large as I can find - one of the many things going on is that my father's eyesight is lengthening. While that's not all that much of an issue when he's watching the TV, if he's trying to read it is a factor. Right now I'm looking at around 13" but can be talked into larger or smaller as price and features may suggest themselves.

For the drive - he's not going to be watching DVDs on it. One of his quirks is that he generally hates movies. OTOH, there have been some CD sent with niephling home movies, which he will want to see. However some of that was because he wasn't in a position to see them online. And even so, I suspect a USB thumb drive would do better for transferring those to the laptop than many other things.