Grosh Family Blog - My Computer Died
Well, we’ve said we weren’t making decisions based on being in the contest, but on what was best for our family finances anyway, but…
Last week, of course while I was desperately working on an overdue project for my volunteer role at the boys’ preschool, my computer made this cute little “doink” noise and went totally dead. One great thing about having a mechanically minded spouse is that most things that can be fixed can be done with just a little time and the cost of a few parts. (Michael ran out for a new part and fixed our broken toilet this morning for $6, for example.) It is especially helpful when your mechanically minded spouse happens to also be a computer geek who specializes in fixing things for a profession. His skill has saved us lots of money over the years because he can build a new computer from scratch with just parts, defrag and decontaminate when we get stuck with a virus, rescue data from a computer that no longer works, reload software, even bring a computer back from the blue screen of death. (Or it has cost us more because he always has to have the newest and the best of everything…J)
So after a little playing around (meaning trying everything to get the thing to power up, unsuccessfully, then using a tiny screwdriver to take the laptop completely apart) Michael determined that the motherboard had died. A new motherboard for this computer would cost about $350. An entirely new laptop with similar features would cost about $600, so we decided it really wouldn’t be worth spending the $350 to fix that old one. But it really doesn’t make sense to spend $600 on a new laptop for me when we could probably get by with both of us using Michael’s computer for a few months until the end of the contest.
And so we start the list…first on the list of things we’ll be adding to our budget when we are done with the contest is a new laptop for me (unless of course we realize that it is working okay to just use one—I’m keeping an open mind…)
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