Since comlinks have all your personal data on them, and in some spots its illegal not to have it on, what should a starting character have? Should I force them to purchase one? What can a non hacker (street sam, mage, adept) do with it. We have played SR4 once and I gave them a crappy one with no programs. Although the comlink was always pretty cheap, I gave better ones to higher lifestyle characters. Except for the hacker in my group, none of the other players spent any money to enhance them, and I did not have a great pitch on why they should.

Help me out. How do your non-hacking characters deal with comlinks and the matrix. Should everyone get a comlink? Should you get one for free at chargen? What programs, if any should a non-hacker have?

I'd assume they have a basice one if they don't buy one because of how SR makes is a "these a standard for everyone" deal about commlinks now.

spam the basic commlinks with annoying crap every run until they spring for a good OS and some spam filters (just some cash or asking the decker to toy with it) and just let em know how they are using em every run, your friend calls you up through your commlink, your e-mail notice from your commlink goes off, etc.

Why should there be a good reason for someone who just wants the functionality to upgrade? If you have a crappy commlink you have a personal computer, cellphone, music player and lots of other things—that leaves you wide open to hackers, has poor connection, has shoddy sound and so forth. If your happy with that there´s really no reason to upgrade, and neither should there be.

Off course if you have good general purpous programs on your commlink you could do some simple computer tasks without being a hacker. There´s always a reason to have a good browse program for seaches. That way you don´t have to bother your hacker with every little tiny thing.