Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for August 24th, 2009

After spending a weekend shuffling computers around my house, and cleaning up disk drives and networks,  it dawned on me that computers in the home have become a commodity that are replaced much more often (certainly more often than 10 years ago).

This commodity typically runs out of vogue (i.e. not enough memory, computing power, graphics power, etc.,) in less than 3 years (interesting that if you buy one for your business you have to write it down over 5 years, but that is for another discussion).

Our family was in dire need of a new computer for my younger children (it really was painful to use, it was 5 years old and really couldn’t keep up with much of anything). We had been looking at replacing the existing computer, however, another methodology came to mind and hence the idea of the hand me down computer came to mind.

My oldest goes back to school soon and she had a new computer last year to go to school with (bought by her grandparents), which was a desktop model. My daughter had mentioned that she had some issues working in the library and such, for research and thought that she might try to get a laptop some time in the next year or so. I went and investigated laptop prices and then found an ok deal in the “crash and dent” section of the Best Buy (well the box was open, that seems to be the only issue with it).

This computer then meant that her desktop computer could be moved over to her sisters, and their computer will now be donated to an organization that could use it.

This made me think that computers really are hand me downs these days, from older children to younger children and finally donated at the end of their use to the family.

The only problem with the hand me downs, is having to renew Anti-Virus and Word processing software along the way.