Friday 18 April 2008

A day of big spending

Ever since I bought a new Dell desktop PC last year my wife and son have taken over use of my older Toshiba laptop. It had gotten to the stage that they would complain when I had to take the laptop to work for a couple of days. I had been thinking of buying a new Dell laptop for a while - aside from having better performance than the older laptop it would also have built-in Wi-Fi which I think may come in handy when we're travelling around Europe on holiday in August. The theory being that it will be easy to find Wi-Fi hotspots to access the Internet, and safer to login to my investment accounts using my own laptop than making use of Internet cafes. Dell Australia had a basic laptop with Vista Home Basic on sale for $749 which I was thinking of buying, and today Emailcash had an offer to get a $200 discount on a slightly higher spec Dell laptop which normally sells for around $899. After adding a slight upgrade to the sound system, the laptop I finally bought today cost around $720 - still slightly cheaper than the lower spec machine I'd had my eye on. As with all computer purchases the trick to avoiding buyer remorse will be to now not browse through any computer sale catalogues for the next 12 months - otherwise I'm sure to see a higher performance laptop on sale for a lower price before I leave for my vacation!

By coincidence I also bought a 1 TB external HDD from Aldi for $300today. Although I've found USB drives very handy for moving files between my various home PCs and work, they don't quite have enough capacity to store everything I might want to access. And although I do back up my most important files onto DVD, I don't do it as often as I should, and don't have a very good filing system. Having a 1TB HDD that can connect to any of my PCs using the USB port will enable me to keep backups of all my files in one central location, and will also make it easy to take all my files with me when I go on holiday to my parent's farm a couple of times a year.

It's just as well I don't spend a grand on computer gear every day!



Yes, I did choose the purple colour for the laptop ;)

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007

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