Laptop rant

Less than 2 years ago I purchased a new Dell Inspiron laptop, from which I have been blogging to you, dear readers.

Earlier this year, the Dell suffered a hard drive failure. I tried reformatting the disc and reinstalling everything, to no avail. She needed new hardware. "No worries!" I thought to myself. Hard drives are easy to replace.

So the Dell got a new hard drive.

Then on Sunday she spontaneously shut down and would not turn back on. The symptoms pointed to a power supply meltdown. I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say: we did the best we could, but the Dell is dead.

I blog to you now, dear readers, from my shiny, new laptop. (From which I've spent the last hour deleting factory-installed bloatware like quick-links to eBay, and other assorted useless garbage. But that's another rant for another blog...)

I have a shiny new laptop. Hooray!

But I have a beef. And that beef is: I cannot understand why it is at least as expensive to replace components or repair a laptop (or cell phone, or any other gadget) as it is to BUY A NEW ONE. This boggles the mind. How can replacing one simple, little power supply cost as much as a brand new laptop? And, I might add, the repair expense does not guarantee that the repaired laptop will be fully functional after said repairs. Because there might be other problems. And those will cost even more money to fix.

This makes me angry. Angry enough to want to reenact the "fax machine" scene from Office Space:


But since that won't solve anything, and I still have photos to rescue from the dead Dell hard drive... I'll just go run instead.

Do you think it's wrong that it's more expensive to repair than to replace our gadgets? Or do you think there's a benefit to "buy new?"