We’re venturing off the rental topic, but I’ll chime in to further the discussion: Our son watches DVDs all the time while we’re going down the road – no problem. We did get him a set of wireless headphones so we’d be able to listen to the radio or chit chat without having to listen to the movie du jour for the umpteenth time. Yes, it is louder in there than in a passenger car, but no so much that we can’t hear each other or the stock radio. We also play games and cards at the dinette table while going down the road. A big help here is a big table-length hunk of that non-skid shelf liner. We play Bananagrams (with Scrabble-like tiles) and cards with little problem, though card games that require stacks are a little more of a challenge and we’re on the lookout for some sort of card stack holders for the coming season. But with the non-skid stuff I think your daughter should be fine with a laptop on the dinette.
As for rattles and such, what we did is the first few trips out we’d take turns getting up out of the passenger seat to determine the source of a rattle then problem-solve to get rid of it. That non-skid shelf stuff is great for between pots, in the silverware drawer, between glass bottles, between plastic shoeboxes… just about everywhere. It doesn’t take much – just a little hunk. For the stove we have a large cutting board that is backed with, you guessed it, the non-skid shelf stuff (glued on with contact cement) and weight and friction keeps it on the stove grate and keeps it nice and quiet when going down the road.
Do a search on cold weather camping - lots of good info out there. If we camp in cold weather it is usually en route to somewhere warm, so it is only the first night or two, in which case we use bottled water and keep the pink stuff in the lines until we're out of freezing temps. But I know there are folks who truly cold weather camp with a lot more insight than I have :)
