I See a New Computer in My Future

I finally broke down and got started on our taxes. I really didn’t want to do them myself this year since they’re so complex, but budget concerns left me no choice. The good news is that it looks like we’ll get a pretty good refund. Can you say “new computer”? :D

All I can say is “It’s about friggin time!” This machine is absolutely driving me nuts. Programs are constantly freezing up for unknown reasons, and while they eventually come back to life most of the time, it’s a serious drain on my time. I’ve estimated my time lost to computer issues at about an hour and a half a day in the absence of a way to measure it, but it’s quite possibly more than that.

If that was the only problem, I would consider a memory upgrade. But it’s not. It’s starting to do some pretty weird things. It decided that it doesn’t want to play nice with any of my three printers, and try as I might, I cannot change its mind. There are also a couple of programs that have ceased to work as they should. I’ve scanned for viruses and other malware and come up with nothing, so I guess it’s just working its way up to a major fatal crash due to old age. I just hope it holds out until I can get a new one.

I’m going to start comparing prices when I get the taxes done and finish the huge project I’m working on right now. Maybe by the time we get our refund, I’ll have found a killer deal on something. At this point I don’t really care if it’s a laptop or desktop, as long as it has the programs I need and the capability to multitask like I need it to. You can bet I’ll be posting the details when I find something!

Thursday, February 19th, 2009 Pinching Pennies, Taxes