[murkle]

Can recommend Chromebook from personal experience.

Auto-updates painlessly. Probably worth getting one with touchscreen and ability to run Android Apps. I've just updated my mum's one to Acer Chromebook R11 CB5-132T (old one was no longer getting updates after c. 5 years)

[heywire]

Chromebooks are great, but there is certainly still some risk if extensions are enabled. My daughter was having problems with her Chromebook, and I found that a bunch of shady extensions had been installed (I had a flashback to the 90's and toolbars). Apparently they were masquerading as games and themes.

[cpncrunch]

I think Chromebooks are about as safe as you can get these days. There is a limited amount of damage that can be done with extensions, especially now that they can only be installed via the chrome web store, and inline installations are blocked. AFAIK it's impossible to do stuff like steal credit cards or install a keylogger via an extension.

[murkle]

I guess you could solve that by making it a "managed" Chromebook. Not sure if that's possible to set up for a non-corporate/school environment though :)

Also: install ad-blocker of course!