Clueless about consoles... your thoughts ladies!

[Mum07]

DH has heavily hinted he'd like a Wii BUT also keeps on about getting a family laptop (rather than using work ones) for storing digital photos and so i was wondering if there's a console with a hard drive that would answer both needs? Any ideas?

your probably looking at a playstation 3 for the 2 things at once....but it is nothing like a wii console.....if you have a perfectly good pc wouldn't it be best to just upload your photo's onto there?...or does 'rather than using work ones' mean you use the pc at work/the company laptop?

Yeah, both the laptops we have at home are work-owned and so the photos can't be permanently housed on it. I think for gaming it's going to have to be the wii and then i might think long-term about getting a DVD recorder thing... am so out of touch i am actually thinking of buying something my grand-parents have recently bought and they're much better informed than i am!

Nintendo Wii would be a fab present for him if you do decide to go down that route. My DH loved having a go of one. Mind you my brother left us his DS Lite when he went off to Uni and DH is forever walking around messing about on that, so would a cheaper console with a Laptop be an option?

i just can't face the idea of buying a laptop when we have access to two perfectly good ones (and a work desktop here too!) and would rather get something that stores photos but also has another 'home' use IFSWIM?

If he wants a Wii for games, he should get one of those. You can get consoles with hard drives, the cheapest option open to you being an XBOX 360, the PS3 is extortionate!

You can combine the two, but the thing is, that games are not the same on all machines. Some people have console loyalty and would never dream of buying a Sony machine over a Nintendo, IYSWIM. Plus, the games are totally different in style at a base level.

I would say IMVHO, that the technology is not yet advanced enough for the two to integrate at a seamless enough level for it not to be annoying to use. But that's me.

I reckon the xbox 360 is the best console - it has the most games out for it, but it is very different to the wii. depends what games he wants to play really.
and you can def play photos on it, but I think they'd have to be stored on cd.

dh says you can store photos on the 360 harddrive, but you need to buy a thing to do it with.

My geeky DP says that a Wii will show photos - you can take your SD memory card from your camera and pop into the front of the console apparently.

You can "paint edit" your photos on the Wii...you could give everyone comedy 'taches

Good idea KerryMum

get cpl of memory sticks as well as the wii

good idea kerrymum!
but not as much fun as a new console

or dp said you could store them on xbox 360 or ps3