Ryan Sholin

Especially that blue Toshiba model that you see for around $1,000 when that’s exactly what you can afford to spend.

Back in December 2004, I did my research, I comparison shopped, and I bought a lemon.  A refurbished lemon with a 90-days-only warranty at that.

I’m not going to get into model numbers and vendors here, but let’s just say that when a deal sounds too good to be true, the quality control guys were probably all on holiday that week.

So now, as my laptop is in the throes of the second of what are commonly listed as the three major malfunctions of this particular genus, I’m faced with a choice:

Do I spend another couple hundred bucks on repairing the lemon, knowing that Problem Number Three looms out there in the dark, or do I fold and ante up for a Mac product of one flavor or another?

And then there’s the wildcard entry: Computer #3 in the house, the dormant desktop that needs a hard drive.  I could always hit up Fry’s for a cheap and big drive, then install Ubuntu…

…not sure I want to take on that sort of project right now, though.

Anyone having any luck with Ubuntu out there?  We tried Redhat a few years back, and it was more compiling than I was really willing to handle.

If you see a picture of a shiny white computer on this blog sometime soon, you’ll know what happened…