Tale of 2 Computers: A Case Study

It was the best of times, it was the worse of times......technologically speaking of course! You guys have read my various anti-consumer computer rants for some time now, but I'm going to actually use a current project as an example of how this situation plays out in detail; otherwise, known as a "Case Study". 

In this particular case, it starts with one of my former colleagues who has gone on to teach and coach at a different school. They are about as average of an American family as you'd want to meet. Mom and dad, both college educated trying to raise two kids and live the great Best Buy......er, I mean American dream. And of course, it being the 21st Century, that dream would include a number of computing devices. I've worked on others for them (he's pretty good at coaching football linemen and teaching history, but not much of a technician), but here's the latest.

This is an Acer Aspire 6930. It's around 3 years old, making it of the late Core 2 Duo generation. This was a good vintage. This design of processors sipped power, but yet, were very powerful. They came along in the Post-SATA and DDR2 revolution, so will take drives and memory that are big and aren't ridiculously expensive. This model was one of the nicer ones for sale at the time at around $1000. It was in the high-end of the Wal-mart range and middle of the Best Buy lineup. Equipped with a good sized 16" screen (warning bell for tech folks), it was shiny, pretty and nicely spec'd. In fact there were even versions that had a second drive capability, so nothing to sneer at!

However, just when things are looking good...... My friend called to say that his wife's computer was experiencing problems with the screen. I turned out that she had a cracked LCD. I figured; no big deal. $50 and she'll be good? Remember when I said that there's a "red flag"? The 16" screen? What is typical in the screen market place: 14.1", 15.4", 17.3"? That's right, the 16" is a bit of an unusual size, which means $$$ because of the great economics Law of Supply and Demand. I promptly got on eBay and started looking....to find that the cheapest screen available was going to $150! Three times the norm! So expensive in fact that people were selling special "conversion" cables to allow computers to use a completely different type of screen! So the next course of action for me was to try and find a broken one with a good screen. I was thinking maybe $100, $125 right? First of all, there was only about 20-something for sale period, only 5 or 6 were broken, of which all but one had......you guessed it.....cracked screens! This sounds suspiciously like a design flaw on a very expensive part. And remember, this thing was about $1000 at purchase time! 

The more I looked at it, the more ridiculous the whole thing sounded to me. I knew I had bought both Dells and ThinkPads of similar generation for less than $150, so I started looking at that as an option. Actually I started looking at similar machines to her's which includes the HP Pavilion G60 and some Toshiba A505, however, they were all well above $150 in selling price, so I turned to the Dell E6500. This machine was the 15.4" version of the E6400 (14.1") which I've bought quite a few of in the last year. Unfortunately, I wasn't quite able to snag one around the $125 mark that I set as a limit. As this was going on, I began to keep an eye on the ThinkPad T61 as well. This is a machine that I'm very familiar with and indeed have my wife on one right now. Well, to make a long story, shorter, I'll cut to the chase and say that I snagged one for $126.20, with all drives, A/C adapter and just needed to have the OS loaded. No Sweat, for that kind of money! Oh yeah! it's also the Intel graphics version that's NOT susceptible to the great nVidia GPU debacle of that generation.

So, what does this all mean? First of all; although, the cracked screen is an accident that couldn't be anticipated and probably not the fault of the computer, I will say that if it's not one thing, it'll be another. At least in the case of consumer PCs, I find that your unlikely to hit year 3 without having to do something to repair or upgrade it. So let's look at this case study: $1000 into 3 years comes to $333 per year. I'll admit that I got a great deal on the T61 so I'll inflate that number a little bit to $225 which is what "ready-to-go" laptops commonly costs. This comes out to be $75 per year. If you aren't some sort of "expert" and need special brand-new leading-edge technology, most people are perfectly fine with a 3-year-old off-lease corporate laptop. So do you really just want to throw that other $150 per year away?