On Aug 12, 2010, at 4:47 PM, Florin Iucha wrote: > <snip> > You can buy a solid machine and get 5 years out of it, or you can > spend 75% now and 75% in three years to replace or fix it. > > Cheers, > florin Agreed. I retired my Dell PowerEdge servers that were personal desktops and FreeBSD machines two years ago after three solid years of my ownership, and they were built in 2002 and 2003. I built two very nice, well spec'd custom machines that are still running well after two years. I also purchased a MacBook Pro that despite the abuse I put it through runs like a champ day in and day out, in July last year. You get what you pay for. A good computer should be considered like this: If the "cheap" model is $500 you'll be looking at $325 per year of ownership. Most machines don't make it past that 18-24 month range (I know some do but most don't). If you are looking at a $600 laptop for a few years and it could give out and you'll care, consider spending twice that for something of quality. Dell laptops, for example: The home user models are plastic. The business models are (nearly) all aluminum. My mother has a plastic dell. She rarely travels with it. My father, at my insistence, purchased a Lattitude and he's a little bit of a clutz from time to time and it has had two service calls on it but it is in better condition after 18 months than an Inspiron would have been in his hands. It's psychological, too, but the more you spend on a device, the better you tend to treat it. But that's because of our waste society, I fear. -- Ryan