Should I repair or replace my computer?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for
askleo.com.
This turns out to be a question I recently found myself asking myself.
I have a computer that was having some issues,
and I was getting to the point where this question, should I just repair or replace
the thing, came up in doing so.
It caused me to think about a number of different issues.
To be clear, there is no blanket answer.
It really does depend on the situation,
the specifics of the situation you're facing.
However, I do have some things that I
looked at, some things that are worth considering as you try and make,
what for many people, is actually a fairly difficult decision.
One of the first things that enters into the equation, of course, is your budget.
Now I say that not for the obvious case
where a new computer costs X amount of dollars and that X is too large.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple.
Repairing a computer can also cost you
depending on exactly how you go about repairing your machine.
It can cost you in parts.
It can cost you in service if you hire somebody to do the work for you.
So it's not necessarily a simple answer,
but it is probably the thing people think of first.
So I want you to be very careful when you take a look at replacing your computer.
That's great. You know what that's going to cost you,
but make sure to balance that against the cost of repair.
You may find that repairing could be as expensive in some cases,
if not close to as expensive as just replacing the machine.
On the other hand, sometimes a repair could be very,
very inexpensive, particularly if you can fix it yourself.
Now, this is something that not everybody is up for.
I totally get that.
Obviously, if something breaks on one of my computers, one of the first things
I'm going to do is see if I can fix it myself.
And in fact, in the scenario that I had, that's exactly what I did.
I spent a fair amount of time trying to resolve the issue at hand on my own.
The problem here is that this has what I'll call a hidden cost.
That hidden cost is your time.
It's going to take some amount of time
for you to do this work, and I'll just be honest and say the result.
The result that you or I as non professional computer repair folks might
not be up to the same level of quality or give you the same kind of result
that somebody who does this for a living might actually get.
You,
on the other hand, repairing things yourself is almost always
less expensive as long as you end up with the desired result.
Now, one of the things I also factor
into the equation on some of these decisions is just how old the computer is.
If it's a relatively new computer, then it may, of course,
be worth spending a little bit more time and a little bit more money to bring it up
to Snuff to fix whatever the problem is you're having with it.
On the other hand, if it's an older computer, well,
then you may not want to be quite as aggressive about repairing it.
It might very well be time to consider replacing it with something newer.
Now, rather than just discarding that computer when you're dealing
with an older machine again, depending on the failure mode,
you might be able to be less aggressive about repairing it.
That's why I used this term and use it in some kind of diminished capacity.
As we'll see in a moment, that's exactly what I've done with one
of the machines that I'm having a problem with.
I have to mention the warranty.
This is one of those things that a lot
of people overlook, mostly because it can be so very inconvenient.
But the bottom line is that if your machine is within warranty and it fails,
exercise the warranty, I realize it's going to be inconvenient
more often than not, it means sending the computer back
for repair, being without it for a while, that can be an issue.
I get that.
But the warranty is there for a couple of reasons.
One is you paid for it.
You deserve to get this thing fixed if
it's under warranty, and also it's important
for the manufacturer to know that their machines are failing.
You, of course, see just a single failure.
But if everybody is experiencing or a large number of people are experiencing
the same failure, the only way manufacturers really going
to not only hear about this, but hear about it in a way that they have
to pay attention to it is if people return the machine for warranty or repair.
So please, if it's under warranty, please do consider doing that.
Now. That does.
Like I said, factor into another consideration,
and that's this concept of what I call convenience and speed.
It's not always possible for us to do without our machine for the length of time
that a warranty repair or for that matter, any repair might take need is real.
If you're a small business in your primary computer, the computer,
perhaps maybe that you use for your point of sale system fails.
You need to get that fixed immediately. That, of course,
then drives a lot of the other decisions you may need to spend more.
You may need to find someone local.
You may need to find someone who can fix it quickly.
You may need to not waste any of your time
on it and focus on getting the machine repaired as quickly as possible,
so that's something that is also very difficult to factor in.
But it is also very important to understand, based on exactly how this
particular failing machine is being used and how important its mere presence is
for whatever it is you're doing now, one of the things I have to bring up
whenever we talk about replacing a computer is the concept of change.
Many of the computers that eventually fail have been around for a while,
and they're often running older versions of the operating system.
I'll just use Windows Seven as an example,
no longer supported, but of course it works.
I mean, if it's working for you, that's great.
There are ways to keep it running safely and securely, but if you end up needing
to replace that machine, you're not going to get Windows Seven,
you're going to get Windows Ten, or perhaps even Windows Eleven
at this point. The point there is that you're
going to be faced with some amount of change.
Now, obviously, I'm an advocate for accepting change.
Embracing change. Even your experience with technology will
be significantly better if you're willing to at least embrace and accept change.
However, I realize also that that's not for everybody.
So the repair or replace decision is also
colored by this willingness to accept change.
Knowing that if you get a new machine, you're going to get a new operating system
might cause you to spend a little bit more effort, a little bit more time,
and extend a little bit more resources on getting the existing machine repaired
so that you don't have to go through the upgrade or the operating system change
or whatever other change might be involved in getting a new machine. If you
end up getting a new machine, one of the things I strongly recommend you
do is consider, given the state of the broken machine, how broken is it?
Can you put it in another role? Can you use it for something else? Is it still
salvageable even if you don't repair it or if you don't repair it completely?
For example, you may.
Well, we'll take a look at my example here in just a second, because that is actually
a very, very clear example of having a machine that works, but it's broken,
and that means I can't do everything I want with it.
The story is a very long one.
I'm going to try and keep it short.
A couple of years ago, I purchased a brand new laptop from Dell.
It was at that time intended to be my desktop machine. For various reasons
it's no longer my desktop machine, but it's still a very nice, powerful laptop.
I ran into a scenario where removing
the power, in other words, unplugging it from line power would cause
the machine to shut down immediately or within a few seconds or within a minute.
It varied.
My assumption was that this was
the battery on the machine, so I replaced the battery.
That didn't help.
I had other issues with that replacement battery, so I replaced the battery again.
Still didn't help. I said, okay, this seems like it's a Windows problem.
No, I ran Linux on it for a day, and sure enough,
in the middle of everything it just shut down without warning.
So clearly there is some kind of a hardware issue or some kind
of a system related issue here where the machine, even with a perfectly good,
fully charged battery, was not reliably running on battery.
I had spent a lot of time trying to resolve this issue.
My intent was at that point to say, you know what?
It's time to cut our losses.
It's time to move on.
I had invested enough time.
I'd lost enough time and money with those
replacement batteries to say, you know what?
I really don't have a good sense for exactly what's wrong here.
I'm positive if I spend enough time and money on it, I can repair it.
But is that really the best use of my time?
Is that really the best use of my funds?
So that machine still runs and in fact, it is running as we speak.
It's off in a different room and now has a different role.
The role it has simply means that it has
to be plugged in all the time as long as it's plugged in.
It's a fine machine.
I needed a laptop that I could run on battery, so I replaced it.
I got myself a brand new machine.
That machine arrived about a week ago as
I'm recording this, and I've been using the new machine for a while.
I'm pretty happy with it.
I will probably do another video or something about that particular machine.
But the point here is that I made
the decision to cut my losses and actually replace what, for the most part,
was a working machine, but it wasn't working enough.
I couldn't get it to run on battery.
And for what I need that laptop to do, I needed it to run on battery.
So like I said, it now has a new role.
A lot of times, the decision on whether
to repair or replace a machine can be fairly complicated.
There are a lot of things to consider.
A lot of things that factor
into the decision on exactly what it is that's appropriate for your situation.
I hope I've given you some things to think
about, and by sharing my example of what I had to go through,
give you a sense of what process you might want to go through.
Should you run into the same scenario.
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I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is askleo.com