In our household we seem to have many computers. I am looking at about five right now in just this room alone. Personally after two years I find it is time to get another computer. One of my daughters always is breaking computers. My husband buys her a new one and gets the brainstorm mom will get the old computer. So my kids keeping getting the state of the art newest computer and slowly I progress up the ladder with their leftovers. Since I am a pack rat and would never actually throw anything away my dinning room has been transformed into a PC department. Those computers that are really meant to be trashed I give away to my daughter's x boyfriends. I warn them that it is about to blow but they do not listen to my advice. It is only a matter of time before I hear a funny story about how they suddenly lost their homework assignemnt when the computer crashed.

My son loves to take computers apart. We have 3 old MACS which were given to me by a school and about 5 working Windows and 3 laptops. He also collects those that people throw out and often successfully gets them to work.

Once I have lost trust in a computer I use it only for e-mails. I used to keep the old computers for games for my kids but now if you want to play games on computers you have to have the fastest and best computers.

It seems we live in a disposable society. Almost all our appliances are too expensive to repair. For ex. the DVD players. They can be replaced as cheaply as $29 but if you want to repair them it can cost $150.

Right now with back to school sales and labor day sales it is the perfect time to take the plunge and buy a new computer and it sounds like it might be a good idea to have an external hard drive to store your important documents and protect your work. Of course I have developed a safety net of my own. I often e-mail to myself whatever report or work I am doing. I also store them on little chips I steal from my son's collection for his Kodak camera and after many bad experiences with losing documents I often make two files which are both constantly updated. If for some reason one file becomes corrupt or crashes I still have the other one and at worse will only lose about 20 minutes of work.

My son likes to buy parts from newegg.com and has successfully put together two computers. He goes to Best Buy and computer stores to see what is available in terms of more memory and then finds something much better at newegg for half the cost. Buying memory is so cheap. From $20 to $200 you can transform an old computer but again if the computer is more than 2 years old it may be cheaper to start new. My sister in law did not follow my advice. Her PC was about 7 seven years old and runs so slowly. She spent over $200 to fix it. I think that was a real waste since for about $300 she could have bought a new computer. New isn't always better (especially for musical instruments) but when it comes to computers it often is.