Have you hit that benchmark in life where your kids are carrying around laptops and talking on the phone to their friends all of the time? Its funny because when I was a teenager I didn’t have cellphones and laptops like they do now, if my friend and I wanted to talk long distance we had to run a longer string between two tin cans and then there was so much static on the line that you couldn’t hear each other anyway.

But what can I say, times have changed and us parents have to change with them. With that said, you can pretty much guarantee that your teens laptop is going to take a lot of abuse in the course of its travels, so you need to do the best that you can to protect everything else. After all you don’t want to buy a new laptop once a month do you?

So I have included a list of cheap, and what we would consider essential upgrades to add to your teens laptop, in an effort to keep it going. If you were to buy them all it could get expensive, so just choose the ones that you think are necessary for your teen.

1. Virus protection is a must have for any teen. You know its funny because I have spoke with a lot of parents that always install anti-virus software on their computer but never thought to install it on their kids computers. They need it more than you do! Every spare moment of their life is probably spent accessing the internet, they probably spend twice as much as time online than you do, so to keep their system running in peak performance you have to keep it safe. There are many cheap anti-virus programs out there these days, you can buy one for under $20, and you can even get some online for free.

2. Get them a laptop skin. Yes, I know this one sounds kind of strange, but it actually has two benefits. Number one your kids will think your the greatest parents ever because you bought them a cool new laptop skin. But from your advantage, you are actually protecting their laptop from all of the bumps, scrapes and bruises with a heavy vinyl skin. This is a great way to make both parents and kids happy at the same time. You can buy laptop skins online for around $20.

3. Protect their laptops from thieves. Over 1 million laptops a year are stolen and only 2% of them are ever recovered by the police. Schools are no exception, in fact they are some of the most likely places for your child’s laptop to be stolen. Someone may break into their locker or steal it out of their backpack, but you can protect it. Synet offers a program that will dispatch a location email from your laptop as soon as it gets an Internet connection if the laptop has been reported stolen. Any connection such as dial-up, cable even wireless will work and it notifies the company of its exact location to be reported to the police. For only $49.95 this adds a great deal of protection for your teens laptop.

4. Set them up with an office suite for doing homework. You want them to do their homework, in fact thats probably why you bought the laptop to begin with, so give them the tools to do it. You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on Microsoft Office, instead, install OpenOffice on their system for free. It is just as good as Microsoft’s program, has all the same features and you can’t beat the price.

5. Monitor their online activity. There are a lot of bad people in this world, and a lot of them are out to get kids. You should monitor your teens activities online in MySpace, forums, chat rooms and anywhere else to make sure that they are safe. Spector Pro by NetBus is a great stealth program that does just that. You can’t find the program files, you can’t add or remove the program, delete it, access it or anything else unless you have the secret code to do so, which means your kids won’t be able to touch it. Now this is the most expensive upgrade in this list, but we still consider it cheap at only $100, your kids safety is worth that much.