I bought my first laptop computer in December 1997.\u00a0 It was a fully loaded Micron, and I spent about $5,000 for it.\u00a0 It served me well until September 2004.\u00a0\u00a0 In October, 2004, I purchased my current Sony Vaio TR-5 laptop.\u00a0 It’s small, lightweight, fully loaded with an extended service battery that lasts me more than 5 hours.\u00a0 It also has a R-W CD\/DVD built-in.\u00a0 It’s wireless is switchable on and off with a switch on the front of the wristrest.\u00a0 It’ has a 10″ screen — a little small, but I wanted a compact size when I bought this laptop, and about the size of a hard cover book.\u00a0 Other than a smaller than ideal screen (but perfect for the footprint I wanted), my only true complaint is the hard drive that is really too small.\u00a0 As I recall, it’s 40G.\u00a0 I can’t remember exactly how much I paid for this — somewhere between $4000 and $5,000.\u00a0 To make my calculations simpler, I’m going to say I paid $5,000 for it.<\/p>\n
Lots of people try to buy the cheapest laptops they can find, but I notice they seem to spend a lot of time complaining about them or replacing them.\u00a0 It’s December 2009 — twelve years since I bought my first laptop.\u00a0 I did some calculations the other night to see what my annual laptop cost has been.\u00a0 I’ll try to walk you through my math — hopefully, it won’t be too embarrassing.<\/p>\n
For the Micron, my average annual cost was:<\/p>\n
6 years, 10 months = 82 months<\/p>\n
Average cost per month:\u00a0 $5,000 divided by 82 months = $60.97<\/p>\n
Average cost per month times 12 to get average annual cost:\u00a0 $731.71<\/p>\n
For the Sony, my average annual cost was:<\/p>\n
5 years, 2 months = 62 months<\/p>\n
Average cost per month:\u00a0 $5,000 divided by 62 months = $80.65<\/p>\n
Average cost per month times 12 to get average annual cost:\u00a0 $967.74<\/p>\n
If I keep the laptop for another year, the average annual cost decreases to:\u00a0 $810.81<\/p>\n
If I keep the laptop for another two years, the average annual cost decreases to:\u00a0 $697.67<\/p>\n
Using these calculations, I see it would be best if I can use this laptop for another two years before replacing it with the MacBookPro of my dreams.\u00a0 Barring catastrophic failure, I don’t see a problem with that plan.\u00a0 For the way I use a laptop, this one will remain technologically viable indefinitely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I bought my first laptop computer in December 1997.\u00a0 It was a fully loaded Micron, and I spent about $5,000 for it.\u00a0 It served me well until September 2004.\u00a0\u00a0 In October, 2004, I purchased my current Sony Vaio TR-5 laptop.\u00a0 It’s small, lightweight, fully loaded with an extended service battery …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-stuff"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}