Time to Replace a Computer

It seems like things have been breaking down a lot around my house. This morning I was putting away some of my skiing turtlenecks and noticed they are looking like they should be replaced. We also have been fighting with one of our cars that really wants to die. Most importantly there is my wife's laptop that can only run for fifteen minutes on the battery before it dies.

That got me thinking about how to know when it is time to replace your computer. I could always just buy a new battery for my wife's computer and it would continue to work for another six years. However it is SIX years old and really needs to be replaced.

I've written in the past that I try to replace one of my computers each year. This past year was my desktop and next year will be my laptop. That is probably overkill for most home computer users. My computers need to be replaced so often because I am constantly working with bleeding edge projects and sometimes those older computers don't have enough horsepower to run some of the newer software required. Besides, I put my old desktops into service as database or web servers and pass my laptops onto another member of the family.

The answer of when it is time to replace your computer really depends on how old it is and what class of machine it was when you purchased it. For instance, if you bought a $300 notebook computer, it might be time to replace it after one year. If it was a $3000 notebook, you might be able to use it for six (like my wife). It all boils down to what will run on the machine. Right now my wife's computer is so old, she can no longer update any software on it. Unfortunately that means that some of the websites she visits won't work because they require updated versions of Adobe Flash or newer versions of Microsoft Office.

Yesterday my oldest son came home from school and mentioned that a friend had recently purchased a computer from eBay for $100. His friend was excited to be getting a new machine and was showing it off to all his friends. After all it came with 128 megabytes of RAM and a 2 gigabyte hard drive. My son sort of burst his bubble when he pointed out that the friends iPhone came with more memory than the new computer at which point the friend realized he had just purchased a worthless computer. Yep, it's time to replace that one before it even arrives.

One Man's Junk is Another Man's Treasure

Yesterday I decided to clean out my food storage area in my basement. As a scoutmaster I live by the Boy Scout motto of "Be Prepared." This means I have a store room of about two to three months worth of food. The idea is that if there is a major snowstorm or a swine flu outbreak that causes me to be quarantined, I won't run out of food.

I started organizing things and realized that I was running low on a few items. My only problem was that spending a bunch of money to augment my food storage is not in the budget this month. So I decided to try an experiment. I set the goal to raise $50 from some other means than my usual computer consulting. At the end of the day I wanted to be able to add $50 of canned goods to my existing supply.

I knew I had a set of old studded snow tires in my garage taking up space. The car they were used with was sold a while ago and so I decided to list them on an online site. I first thought about eBay but didn't want to pay their fees nor did I want to have to worry about shipping them to some far-flug location. I thought about craigslist because it is free and has the ability to define items by location as well as category. In the end I decided on KSL which is a local news company that has TV, radio, and web outlets. They allow you to post classified ads for free. More importantly they are generally only used by people in my geographical area.

I logged onto their website and saw that they currently have close to 3,000 wheels and tires listed. My heart sank. Who was going to look through that many listings for a pair of old snow tires. I decided to give it a try anyways.

I went to the garage and pulled out one of the tires. I made sure to hose it off so it looked clean. I let it sit in the sun while I ate lunch and then took a picture of it with my iPhone. I made sure to get in close so you could see the condition of the tread as well as the gnarly metal studs that really grip the ice. I pulled the picture off my iPhone and shrunk it down to 640x480 pixels using Gimp (KSL's requirement for picture sizes). Then I attached the photo to my ad where I talked about how those tires could climb a greased telephone pole. I then went back to work with crossed fingers.

At 7pm last night I got a call from a guy looking for tires for his daughter's car. I explained that these tires had been used for my daughter's Buick and that they were very safe when driving in the snow. With all the skiing we do, we never got stuck with those tires. An hour later he came by the house, looked at the tires, and paid me with cash.

As soon as his car was down the street, I jumped into mine and headed to the local supermarket where they were just finishing up their case-lot sale. I managed to pick up the items I needed to round out my food storage. Now it is time to go through my house looking for other junk to unload. Maybe I can get myself a new TV.