What Decision Would You Have Made?

Last week one of my good clients called me to help her with what turned out to be a gummed-up laptop. Hey, what can I say? That’s the best way I can describe it. It was completely locked up and when I finally forced a hard reboot, it would alternate between working again and locking up about every 5 minutes.

I tried taking a few common steps I take in these situations to remedy the problem but the laptop just didn’t want to play nice with me. After about 30 minutes, I made the determination that there was a bigger issue involved with the laptop. Something that a computer repair expert would need to take a look at.

Options?

My client agreed to let me take the laptop to a computer repair person for an estimate but before I did, she asked me if she would be better off getting a new laptop instead of trying to fix her existing one.

This is a dilemma many of my clients face and there never is a clear-cut answer. In this particular case, I was looking at a 2-3-year-old laptop running Windows Vista. The estimate from my computer repair person was somewhere between $45 – $125 (depending on what she found) not including any costs of parts that may need to be replaced if it turned out to be a hardware issue.

On the other hand, a brand new laptop in the same category as the one my client had would run about $560 and would have more memory, a bigger hard drive, a faster processor, and Windows 7. And the existing laptop could be recycled for parts for approximately $50.

What would you do?

So I ask, what would you do in this situation? Pay the $45 – $125 and hope that it’s nothing major that requires more spending? Or toss the old laptop out, recoup $50 from it, and put it towards a brand new Windows 7 laptop for $560?

P.S. I’ll tabulate the poll results after a few days and then reveal which decision my client made.