Lately i replaced my laptop after my previous ones harddrive died it would have been an easy fix but it was about time i replaced it original price £450 4 years ago Celeron 1.6ghz 1gb ram 80gb HDD windows vista basic New laptop £440 athlon p520 iirc 2.3ghz (cba to check) 4gb ddr3 320gb hdd windows 7 home premium Now at the time of purchasing my new one i was offered a £60 swap in of my new one which seemed fair but i thinks its worth more if i fixed it atleast to me it is! its a perfectly adequate system also my mum wanted a laptop so i thought i could pass it on Now she bugs me all the time thing that irritates me is i can't seem to fix it because all she is willing to spend is £10 on a harddrive... it pisses me off because this thing took me ages to pay off when i was 14!! now im 18 its worth a measly £10 to my mum she is not willing to give me anything else almost like im EXPECTED to give it away it sucks... thing is she does'nt instant message no facebook bullcrap no forums no real hobbys she can do stuff online about... she spends about 30 minutes a month paying the odd bill online (which she makes my dad do..) and look for cruises and holidays she can't afford... so its just going to be left doing nothing anybody else get this from parents? putting no value on your hard earned stuff
Oh yes, my dad still claims the machine I left him, cobbled together from all my old bits, is his as he bought our first Dell 10 years ago and 'can tell no difference'. It's so frustrating!
Yeah. It's been... two weeks, almost three, actually, since my xbox was stolen. We still have not sent off the insurance claim, well, my Dad (whose name the policy is in) hasn't. Furthermore, he didn't really seem to understand that the loss of the xbox is analogous to if some of his family heirloomy stuff was taken, because I'm not sentimental but the xbox was the most valuable thing I owned (that was in the house.), and not only in the monetary sense but in the 'hours spent on it' sense. "Yes, I know you're happy that they didn't take any of the silver stuff, but they took a few hundred hours of my life." Tonight I pointed out that my xbox live subscription is still progressively getting closer to expiration time. My Dad wants to replace all the windows in the house before replacing the Xbox. The windows won't be replaced for another 6 weeks, at minimum. I didn't pay for 9 months of xbox live, I paid for a year. He doesn't quite get it.
I've built up my dads machine a few years ago, its his and I've got no worries about it. Its the random over the phone tech support that bugged me more than anything. I gave my old machine to the girlfriend and its been the most stable build I've know and silent dirty silent that it spooks me. Because I move onto new hardware I can't recover the money spent so I merely hand it down that way I know it gets use.
I'm planning to give my dad my current pc when I upgrade. I'll take out the bits I want to keep and replace them with cheaper variants of course. I figure it won't piss me off so much when I want to go online when I go home, and mum can have dads current pc instead of her entirely crap laptop
I had a guy at work offer me his old PC saying it was worth loads. AMD athlon socket A @ 1.4 GHz and 256MB (2x128) of RAM. I told him I've given better away for free. I sold PC's years ago and we used to lease some systems. We had one guy buy a £10,000 worth systems on a 4 year lease purchase deal. at the end of 4 years and having paid about £9000, he had the choice of either 1) paying 50% of the original price (£5000) and keeping the kit 2) Using the kit as a deposit for a new system (value was £1000) 3) Walk away with nothing. He was going to lease a new system...... Until it clicked in his head, that he paid £2250 last year in the lease terms for a system that was worth £1000. He went nuts. He wents really nuts when he realised if he had tried to dump it a year early he would have found himself in court with his kit confiscated and a bill for the arrears. NEVER buy a PC system on finance, you may end up paying more in the last year than the PC is worth.
Those lease schemes are an absolute con. Where I used to work they'd do a new one every year. A few people I know did them and I all I can say is they are not so happy about it now. I did warn them they'd pay three times the amount the system was worth by the time they'd finished the scheme and it was time for a new one. Still I can't talk, I bought a Laptop on a credit card and then spent the best part of three years paying it all off (don't ask !) Thankfully my parents aren't like that, it was my Dad who started the whole PC thing off anyway when I was 9 or 10. He's actually quite realidtic when it comes to selling stuff off before it looses any value thats left in it before it's time to throw the stuff in the bin/give it away. I do agree that £10 is really mean and I personally would just sling the laptop as it is on the bay and get what you can for it, I suspect it'll hit more than £60 if it all it needs is a new hard drive. I slapped up a Sony Vaio laptop not so long ago with a failing GFX card (GeForce 8400) and got over £100 for it.
The worst thing about the tenner is that it's not an offer of payment for the laptop, it's a maximum spend for an upgrade. Unless someone is very nice you won't get a drive for that much, so in effect you're going to pay your mum to take your laptop. Ouch. My parents just use a pc till it's beyond use, at which point it goes in the roofspace or I scavenge it for idle tinkering, and they buy a new one. Almost at the point of needing one again. I'm trying to convince dad to let me build them one for about £300, purely so I have something to plan and build again
Maybe I'm a bit older a wiser. But just take the hit repair it and give it to your mum because its the nice thing to do. That's what I would have done in fact its what I have done for both my parents and little sister. Too many winging post this week.
He's likely still a student so being nice could be difficult. Especially when its $60+replacement hdd kind of nice. DeadP1xels maybe you should just left her know that the sale of the laptop is going towards its replacement and that it's at least $60 at the store. So maybe try to get her to chip in $80, then pass it on to her? Of course you'll need to take a bit of a hit. But hey, everyone should feel a bit better (Hopefully). And it is your mum afterall.
I'm sure she'd appreciate your contribution to the household, which isn't what i'd call putting no value on your hard earned Unless you also pay for all of your own expenses, such as phone, internet, school, transport, plus your fair share of electricity, water, gas, food & board, in which case she can pay for her own hdd.
yep, point her in the direction of OCuk or Scan and show her how much a HDD costs, or use it as her next Bday Present but essentially its your mum, just let her have it.
I hate how computers lose value so qickly as much as the next guy, but I usually just hold onto my second hand stuff if it's not going to be worth while selling, stick it in a new/old/different case and put it to work doing something else. Folding, new computer for the office at home, new server or whatever. Or if I can make it look and run well I'll sell it off cheap to a customer as a refurbed machine. I win either way - I either get another few months or years use out of hardware I've decided to change or I recoup some of the money it took me to buy the stuff in the first place.
Surprisingly, no. When mum's old notebook was no longer fast enough, she asked two questions; can it be upgraded (nope) how much is a new, reasonably powerful one? We jumped in the car, took a trip out to the shops where she bought herself a new Dell XPS. But then she does manage the network at her school, soo... The story is pretty much the same for the rest of the family, and while I'll offer them my old kit so long as it's faster than whatever they're currently using, I'd never expect them to pay for it. I accept the fact that whatever I pay for kit brand new, I'll never see again in monetary terms. Family aside, working in IT you come into contact with many people who genuinely have no idea how much technology is worth. For decades I've had people asking me for advice on new computers/notebooks. When I ask them how much they're willing to spend, they almost always answer "£300." I have no idea where the figure comes from, but the amount remains static.
Yeah, I hear that figure a lot too. I suspect the "super cheap" deals at Tesco/Aldi/Whoever for a £300 bag of bolts laptop are to blame. As for the topic, no. Possibly because my dad - Last time I spoke to him - Is fairly aware of the cost of IT related stuff, and my mum is reasonable. Then again, I did buy mum her current laptop a few years back. I'd want to replace it by now, if I were her, but she's content with it. Hell, when my first 360 died mum fronted me the cash to replace it, because even though she didn't understand my willingness to part with obscene amounts of money for a whirring box (She refers to my PC/consoles as "Square box things"), she recognised it was important and that I'd pay her back when I got paid. Both my uncles live and breathe IT like I do, so there's nothing misinformed on their part, either.
The money is not the point its the expecting... For example you lend money from someone and buy yourself something,3 years later you buy an upgrade and by some sort of unexpected right they claim the old item as ther own... because they lent you some money you paid back. I said to her "No i did'nt bother trading it in because you can have it..." but she is barely willing to chip in to get it fixed.. its probebly something im going to end up paying for in reality "im not paying anymore for it" Im trying to get a decent some of money to get a Hdd but i said "You're not going to get anything decent for £10" then she moans i should have traded it in.. Im not whining about not getting anything for it else i would have traded it in i never expected family members to pay thats wha familys do help each other out but i can't pay to fix it aswell
Meh. He paid around £2250 the first year which was less than a quarter of what it was worth then, so what's his problem? That's how leases work - you get the value out of equipment without having to stump up the cash up front, but you don't own the equipment unless there's a buy out clause at the end. 50% is unusually steep - most are more like one extra payment because in general lease companies aren't in the business of reselling old hardware. We're coming to the end of our lease agreement at work - about £150k worth of equipment costing something like £16k per quarter - and our lease company has offered us the options: a) send the kit back, or b) renew the lease. WTF? No final payment option? It's going to be one hell of a job decommissioning all the systems including our telephone system, and replacing them with new ones, and continuing paying £16k per quarter for 3 year old computers isn't a great option either. At least that's the FD's problem, not mine - although it'll rapidly become mine if he decides to send everything back... Anyway - a bit OT I guess... sorry
It may just be me, but these lease deals seem an awfully bad way to equip a company with tech. I get the appeal that you don't have to front the initial cost of the equipment, and admittedly I haven't thought about this too much or run any numbers, but... wouldn't you save more money by just getting a standard business loan from your bank, using that to buy the kit you need and the interest + repayments should be less than whatever you would have had to pay the lease company?
when i was at uni, i was trying to sell my parents the 22inch i had, they didn't want to pay over £50 for it (worth over £100 at the time) so i sold it to my housemate. now, when i've got a job, i gave them the 17inch secondary screen and a high quality HD webcam the other day. they are your parents, they deserve to get things for free from you. i plan to buy them a faster computer and a HTPC over the next year. remember, they've raised you without asking you for anything in return.
