quote:

Originally posted by wrightd:
Well Oz, I have been in your exact shoes. Best option is to buy a new laptop. It will be a bazillion times faster than your old ferrari, and that's for a cheap new one, you don't need to spend big money. As long as it's a known major brand, and you're buying one with a pre-installed Microsoft Windows operating system (don't mess with Chrome Book tablets and other junk like that), you'll be very pleasantly surprised guranteed.

Go to Best Buy, Office Max, Target, and Walmart, and then back to Best Buy since they always have the best selection and price in town. I've done this several times for myself and others over the years, and I always end up at Best Buy in the end. You can buy laptops over the net, but I like to touch then in the store and fire them up at home, just in case you get a DOA machine, however that is extremely rare these days. It's just a thing I prefer.

I have a new laptop that I use for work on the go. I prefer two large monitors ready to go on the desktop at home. It lets me remote into the office desktop and work as if I am sitting right there. I’ve done it with the laptop but it’s not the same.

I get a new one when the software is no longer supported and even then, I use it until it starts to get buggy and websites stop loading correctly.
I believe my last iMac was from 2010 and lasted me until about a year ago.

It still "works" so I might put it in the garage to use if I need to look up something online or play music.

When it won't take the latest MacOS, I start thinking about it, and I get off before the security updates are no longer issued for the last OS it does support.

Why not wait until it breaks?

You get that sign that things are slowing down, it's not as peppy as you'd like. Then I see how far away am I for the next big sales season. That's what I did with my last one. It was a the 5 year and 9 month mark. I have no worries about data loss as I have multiple data and software backups. Every time I buy, I try to buy the latest that fits my minimum requirements.

The one thing I would try before buying a new one next time is to do a reset. I gave my last laptop to a kid and I reset the computer. The main problem I remember was I couldn't play sounds through it. Well, sumbitch if everything was back in tip top shape afterwards. If I had known that, I would have done that instead of buying a new one.

I don't know how long we had it, but I guess it was considered almost antique by today's standards. It was developing some glitches, and ran on no longer supported Windows 8. Our computer guy switched everything over, but still there were this and that details to clean up after switching. Not at all fun for me. I don't enjoy complexity, I just want it to work. But now DONE! Hope we're set for the next few years.

When it does this.....

I'm about ready to give up on Win98.

Hey, I liked Windows 98. It was good enough to upgrade from Windows 95 with USB support.

I think it was Vista that had the technical bulletin about removing the end user from the diagnostic process. It worked!

They removed this end user from the Windows process entirely. I have the same Mac that I bought in 2011.

When will I upgrade? Perhaps when Xfinity finishes splicing the lines down the road.

I currently have AT&T internet and they haven't upgraded the speeds since 2003.

...when you get tired of that modem screeching sound.

I replaced my laptop when the letter A stopped working. Before that, it was the end of support for Windows 7. I don't know if I simply don't get into hardware or if I'm just cheap. Or both.

quote:

Originally posted by Oz_Shadow:

quote:

Originally posted by wrightd:
Well Oz, I have been in your exact shoes. Best option is to buy a new laptop. It will be a bazillion times faster than your old ferrari, and that's for a cheap new one, you don't need to spend big money. As long as it's a known major brand, and you're buying one with a pre-installed Microsoft Windows operating system (don't mess with Chrome Book tablets and other junk like that), you'll be very pleasantly surprised guranteed.

Go to Best Buy, Office Max, Target, and Walmart, and then back to Best Buy since they always have the best selection and price in town. I've done this several times for myself and others over the years, and I always end up at Best Buy in the end. You can buy laptops over the net, but I like to touch then in the store and fire them up at home, just in case you get a DOA machine, however that is extremely rare these days. It's just a thing I prefer.

I have a new laptop that I use for work on the go. I prefer two large monitors ready to go on the desktop at home. It lets me remote into the office desktop and work as if I am sitting right there. I’ve done it with the laptop but it’s not the same.

Well Oz, if you buy a new laptop now, you'll have time to xfer your files from you old F14 before it bites the dust after some accidental Windows update kills it. And, you can plug your new laptop into your big monitors at home, so you will have the best of both worlds - portability when traveling and dual big monitors at home. Laptops these days are very light and trim (both large and small screens and keyboards), and run completely on memory. No more mechanical hard drives etc. You can buy a cheap thumb drive to xfer your stuff from your old computer to your new one, if you want to handle it that way to keep things simple if you're not up to networking, offsite xfer strorage, etc. You can even plug in an old external dvd drive and xfer files that way too, but a thumb drive or offsite secure storage vendor account would be easier. No biggie. But if you wait until it dies, it could be harder to get your stuff xferred, though you could always dig out the old HD after the old box croaks, buy a cheap adapter, and plug it into the hdmi port of your new machine etc. There are other ways to do it some guys on the Sigforum could help you with as well, I'm not the best windows power user. But the bottom line is, since old reliable is 9 years old, it's a matter of time at this point, so if it fails to boot tomorrow morning it won't owe you anything.