you can save taxes and shipping by buying the computer at BH Photo or New Egg instead of local.

Unless you already have a great laptop, I suggest you buy a laptop (15.6" is good, like Asus or Lenovo with 16gb of ram, using I7 processor with high res. screen 1920 minimum) and then you can use an external monitor for more photo viewing. You can then use the laptop in any room by itself. This is what I use for editing photos, along with a desktop with 32gb of ram and 2 - 34" monitors. You can't have too much screen usage when editing/viewing photos. Make sure your monitor used hdmi and the computer has a hdmi output. Good luck

I have done dozens of these type books and the best way is to create the book is in adobe InDesign, which is used by most magazine publishers. You can turn it into a PDF in a couple clicks and print it if want to. It gives you ultimate control over everything. Do not use MS Word ; it is a terrible layout program. A cheaper alternate to InDesign is MS Publisher, which is probably 25% as good, but good enough for most personal work. Creative suite by the month is $50 mo but you can use about 25 high end programs or get a copy of Publisher for less. Again, avoid Word, you will be frustrated by layout lack of quality in word, which is great for ordinary text. If you are interested, contact me and I can provide you a couple samples on drop box to see what can be done. I have been doing layout design for over 50 years now. good luck.