I bought a cheap $500 laptop in December 2012 to replace my trusty Thinkpad which after 5 1/2 years of abuse started to fall apart (and didn’t have enough memory or disk space for my programs). I figured if I was going to end up replacing it every 5 or so years, I might as well get a cheap machine — especially in light of the fact that most laptops now are plenty powerful for the 90s-era looking XFCE window manager that I run on Linux.

The thing is when you buy cheap, you get cheap. 5 months after I bought the laptop, I accidentally cracked the screen by setting it down the wrong way in my truck when camping. The screen was only $60 to replace, but it was a pain to install the new one. Now at 19 months old, the laptop battery went from a good battery life quickly to shorter battery life to unexpectedly shutting off to no battery life at all. It looks like that will be something like $40-50 to replace, once I finally get the money to do it.

I won’t mention it costs $90 to fill up my pickup. But priorities… I can use my laptop on hte charger as need be for now.