Life Lessons With Grandma C.

Here it is almost 2 weeks since I last posted. I barely turn around and my days are gone. What with working at an ESL library, commuting to downtown Toronto, and household chores, I barely have time to eat and sleep, let alone do computer stuff. I try to read my forums and email, but sometimes am too tired to type.

I decided since my travel time is so long, I should buy a laptop so that I can get some stuff done then. After checking prices and stores for a few weeks, I found a store that sold used laptops for reasonable prices. The one I liked was missing the charger, so I had to wait two weeks for it to come in (was told it would be 3 days). By then I had spent the money elsewhere so didn’t get it.
This weekend I was Cash Convertors looking for electronic games and saw a Toshiba laptop for $200 - Pentium II, but it’s enough for my purpose. It was advertised with a 10 gig hard drive, but when I got it home it was only 4 gig. I should have checked the size while I was in the store. I also found out that the battery is dead. It works fine with the charger plugged in, but defeats my purpose for a laptop. According to the Internet, a new battery for that model is $150 US.

Now my dilemma is should I pay for a battery? Who knows how long the machine will last? The warranty is only 30 days, so I don’t want the screen to go after paying more money. Only problem is that I can only get an exchange, no refund - so I may be getting stuff from there for a very long time before I use up my credit - unless somehow they have a working model at one of their other stores.

The other thing I learned is that when you get rid of a computer, make sure you take your information off it. This was a company machine and still had budget reports, specialty company software, etc. Unless this guy was fired and did it on purpose, I don’t know what he was thinking!

Anyway, back to the searching for a good deal. I leased my Dell PC and later bought it and lately I’ve been thinking about doing the same with a laptop. Do I want to pay for two years, or do I not? On the plus side, I could write it off every month on my taxes - hmm.