Computer Problems

June 23rd, 2009 by monnibo

I am slowly coming to realize that I may need to buy a new laptop. I don’t know if this 3-year-old MacBook is worth the investment of getting it fixed. I have a feeling it would cost less to just buy a new MacBook. For a while now I’ve had battery life issues. This usually means that I can’t have it unplugged from the power source for more than 5-10 minutes or it just shuts off. I’ve dealt with it, although it has limited the mobility of my laptop, it’s been okay.

But over the weekend I forgot my laptop and left it at home not plugged in. It obviously had trouble keeping the harddrive alive because booting up yesterday I kept getting a “kernal panic” message which basically says you need to reboot for whatever reason. Booting up just now took about 20 minutes and I had to keep turning it off and on, off and on, until it booted up. Sometimes it would just sit there making the boot up noise a bunch of times, doing nothing.

So I’m looking at a 13-inch MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM (which I was considering updating on this computer anyway). It’s $1,749.00, with free shipping… but we also now have an Apple Store here in Vancouver, so I might go down and play with some of the new computers. Is 3 years too short of a lifespan for a laptop that I use every day, sometimes non-stop for several hours at a time? Have I got my money’s worth when I spent $1,600 on this machine?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 10:35 am and is filed under HTML & Web design, Personal, Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 responses about “Computer Problems”

Margaret said:
June 23rd, 2009 at 11:29 am
eee, so your battery is dead and your HD is having issues. Honestly, I am not sure how much it would cost to fix up those issues but i imagine it’d be over 400.

What kind of strange noises are you getting? If it’s the click-click sound, then it sounds like what happened to my macbook twice before (HD dying).

I’m leaning towards voting to get a new laptop becuase the new macbook pro is incredibly sleek and nice. I’d research a bit to read up on Apple rumors and news though, before deciding.

http://macbook.macrumors.com/
http://www.appleinsider.com/

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Marina Antunes said:
June 23rd, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Any technician will tell you that if your PC lasts more than three years you’ve gotten a great deal. Me – I use mine until they don’t start up anymore. This sucked I use now (every day for hours on end) is 3+ years old. A little on the slow side but works awesome!

But oh…how I lust after a Mac…

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Anna said:
June 24th, 2009 at 12:46 am
What a bummer! I’d say 3 years is about par for the course though, unfortunately.

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Chan said:
June 24th, 2009 at 8:16 am
I am sooooooo not the right person for techie advice, but you know that. I hope you have a positive solution very soon!

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Bubblesknits said:
June 24th, 2009 at 9:01 am
Yeah, I’d have to agree with most of the comments above. 3 years is pretty acceptable for a laptop. A techie friend of mine calls them “disposable computers”. I’d definitely say it’s time to look for a new one. :-)

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Ruth said:
June 26th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
After reading the other comments, I wonder if I should change my answer to “$1600 for laptop!!”

My old Hewlit Packard PC worked like a champ for over 5 yrs. Then on Christmas Day I spilled soda on the keyboard and I thought it was all over…but, I quickly dried it off, blew it dry, and prayed. Long story short, I replaced the keyboard and the silly thing is still working..now over 6 yrs old.

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