Daily Pundit, I Think You Answered Your Own Question

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by Smitty

Quick is asking:

Tell me what sort of electronics you own that you would pay $200 an hour to have repaired, rather than junking it and buying new?

Precisely. No one wants to deal with the expense of these modern, highly integrated electronics. The manufacturing runs are so tiny that getting a repair part six months after the sale may be simply impossible. So you price the labor out of the reasonable range.

Stacy McCain’s old laptop was the hardware equivalent of a Steven King novel. If he’d insisted, for sentimental reasons, to have that thing resurrected, $200/hour would have been a lowball labor cost just to get someone to touch that thing.

31 comments

  2. I was about to say nothing, but I would pay that amount for my camera. Other then that nothing. Since I can fix just about any computer problem myself. If I can’t fix it,  I just replace it. With the cost of electronics being so cheap , its as we live in a disposable world. 

  6. I lived in a comparatively rich area for a decade as a child. I can think of children and young people who were raised to expect a certain standard, or ones who were taught values that make them often disliked. I can think of people who have always been provided for and thus never faced many challenges or learned from hardship. It seems to me that things are all right: how they work and how we then work through them. You seem like a positive, playful person, helpful, reliable, caring, someone who welcomes others and adds to others’ well-being, someone seldom if ever flustered. Then again, you seem to have a lot of views that are against things, more than many people I know. The contrast doesn’t make sense to me, but obviously it makes sense to you. Do you see the world as broken?

  10. All the important files on my laptop are saved on an slim external drive.  The internal HD just holds the OS and programs.  Doing this also makes file transfers between the laptop and desktops much easier.

  11. Bob, if you’re going to do that, a disk encryption program is a good idea. It’s too easy for external drives to grow legs.

  13. Wombat/Bob:

    The concept of a ‘personal, pocketable bootable OS on a USB flash drive’ is a good one. This is catching on for a category of people who travel a lot, or are on a trip for an extended time, or a just paranoid about security issues.

    Anamika, the Linux geek, has experimented with the ‘Ubuntu’ distro and generally likes it.

    This is all  about the possibility of carrying all of your personal ‘online’ information with you, on a USB ‘thumb drive’, which will boot any X86 (IBM-compatible) desktop computer. Imagine staying with relatives, and trying to use their home comp for your own uses online; is their comp infected with keyloggers, is it zombied, etc?

    Just plug your USB drive into the comp, and reboot, designating the flash drive as the boot volume during startup. The comp boots from the flash drive, and your online session can be as safe as it gets, with NO ‘history’ of web browsing, record of emails, no keystroke logging, etc.

    There are the ‘issues’ of settings, such as ISP/network, etc, but those are generally overcome by practice and study of the specific boot system.

  14. Hi Wombat, why did you delete ALL gg comments?  Yeah, i know you don’t work for me, but still…why do you treat him like an ‘untouchable’? Thanks.

  17. Wombat, Bob, I do all the above, but it’s the loss of the stuff I’m working on RIGHT THEN that drives me up the wall…

  20. My 18-month old Acer laptop won’t start now.  It’ll cost me at least $99 an hour just to see what is wrong with it, let alone how to fix it.  For the cost of 5.5 hours of labor, I could buy a new one.  It’s insane.

  26. Far too true.  I work on the longest ranged Naval weapon system in service, and our solution to a useless electrical component is to replace the component.

  28. Well, I have a seven year old Gateway laptop that still chugs along right nicely, but I hear they got bought by eMachines and aren’t as good as they used to be. Asus is probably your best bet if you don’t fancy the PRC having an ear in your motherboard and are still (like myself) carrying Cold War grudges that make Toshibas unacceptable. Or a Mac, if you like that sort of thing.

  30. Create your work files on the external drive.  The saves may go a tiny bit slower [although, on my Western Digital Passport Drive they don’t], but it’s worth it [I speak from experience].

    Also, don’t get a ExDrive with any moving parts.

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