Posted in Reads on September 19, 2008|
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Well, one of the biggest headaches I had to deal with when I got back to the US was the failure of my Sony Vaio. I am the first to admit that it wasn’t the top of the line model, but a couple of years ago I paid right around a $1000 for it. It was nice enough for me. It had started acting weird before I left, but I attributed that to a virus or corruption…but no.
When I couldn’t find a solution, I took it to a computer repair place here in Seattle. So I get a call from the shop. My hard drive was failing. Not an all together out of the ordinary problem I suppose. “How much for repair,” I ask. $79 for a new, better hard drive. $90 an hour for labor with 2-3 hours of labor. “Oh…” I say. And then I proceed to discuss the pros and cons of spending the cash on this particular laptop. In the end, I could go out to BestBuy or the like and buy a faster, newer computer for a comparable price. So I had them recover all the data, transfer it to a new Maxtor 320gb portable hard drive. Still cost me a pretty penney to have all the data rescued and transfered. But we have all of our pictures for the last 5 years or so on the computer.
So I started the search for a new laptop. And I started with the $499 crowd. Nice laptops. No doubt. But you add a couple of options, and soon your $499 laptop is now $899. And of course I was having the whole “Should I switch to Mac” debate. The new MacBooks are cool. Anyway, back and forth back and forth. I was searching the big box stores, the internet, craigslist and eBay. I finally found a black MacBook, still under its factory warranty (which meant it is eligible for AppleCare for 2 more years) and all for less than a nice Dell.
I did it.
I own this now: 
Very pleased with the decision.
It lives in this bag from BuiltNY :
I did so much searching on craigslist for a good deal, I ended up finding a little G3 iBook for our son for super cheap. He’s happy to have a computer.
I so satisfied so far that we’re now looking for a G4 iBook for the wife.
And one final note on my rampant consumerism patriotism. These are all in the mail:
If You Want Blood You’ve Got It
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell by Tucker Max.
And on the advice of the iGenius or whatever they’re called, Mac OS X; The Missing Manual
Fun.
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