My birthday is a few weeks away and as gift to myself I bought a new laptop. My old dinosaur Compaq Presario is nearing extinction. I’ve had it for almost a decade and bought it for $2400 new. I have since done about $1000 in upgrades and repairs on it and it is starting to show signs of needing more. I looked into the cost of parts I’d need to get it back to 100% and it would cost me about $400+. As old as it is it is slow, lacks capacity, and can’t be upgraded beyond it’s current 2GB of RAM. With new laptops running at around $500 and being 3 times the speed and capacity of my current laptop, the decision was simple: buy a new one! (more…)