Picking a New Computer

Our family has depended on my old laptop from college since we got married. (And we're celebrating our 5th anniversary this month!) For graduation, my parents got me a Dell Inspiron 600m. It's been so good to us.

But however attached and loyal I might be to my things (my old 1999 Sentra would be another example), it doesn't change that things get old and worn out. Especially electronics.

So, when I began getting what around here we call the Blue Screen of Death, my husband began preparing me for the worst. We had a friend work on the computer, which helped it hobble along another six months, but recently it's been freezing up, randomly shutting down, has a pink tint to the screen, and manages to let all sorts of new "errors" come up. When it just plain stopped working for a whole day last week, it was time to order a new one. Since my husband and I have been talking about it for at several months, we knew almost exactly what we wanted. Here was our thought process.

Three things dominated our decision:
1) Available money
2) Portability
3) Brand/Quality

Available Money: We are cash buyers, which means if we don't have it, we generally don't spend it. We hadn't saved up what we wanted for a new computer, so we talked back and forth about the value in getting a cheaper, possibly refurbished or bottom of the line computer until we'd saved up for what we wanted.

We only considered this (which would have us spending more total money in the long run) because we absolutely have to have a computer at home. If we didn't have our small businesses, we could have let the computer die and then waited until we could buy another one.

In the end, we came into some extra money and didn't need to make this decision. However, I think it makes good financial sense to either wait entirely to get a new computer, or to get a cheap interim computer until you can save up. Going into debt for a gadget should not be an option, in my opinion. Think appreciation vs. depreciation.

Portability: Do we go desktop or laptop? This was a short conversation. We travel a lot, go to different wifi hotspots often, and want the option of doing our business wherever we want to be. A desktop would be nice for sometime later, but for now, with only one computer, a laptop is what we need.

Brand/Quality: This whole sickness with my computer has been going on for nearly a year. I was just plain sick of it (haha). It's incredibly annoying to have a laptop on hospice. When we began thinking of which brand computer to buy, the fact that I'd always had glitches, viruses, and unexpected problems with my Dell became a factor. It hadn't bothered me that much, but if we could improve on it, I wanted to.

Enter the Mac cultists. Why is that most Mac users are walking advertisements for the brand? That, my friends is the question. They don't get viruses, they say. It doesn't shut down, or give you the blue screen of death. When researching it (yes, research every question you have, and every comment you read or hear!), it looked as though there were occasional problems, but that for the most part, the Mac groupies weren't exaggerating.

We took the plunge and decided to go Mac. After that, it was mostly a decision of speed and size. We wanted something fast enough to handle our movie watching and downloads, but we're not gamers so we didn't need much. After debating the epic 13" or 15" question, we ended up with this beauty yesterday:


Macbook Pro 15"

For more info:
http://store.apple.com
http://dell.com
http://jonnybaker.blogs.com/jonnybaker/2004/10/mac_or_dell.html