"You don't want that one," the salesperson tells you. "It doesn't have enough memory or hard drive space for what you're trying to do with it." Then he steers you towards another laptop that looks the same but costs twice as much.
Despite salespeople like that, I fell in love with the $300 Compaq on display. And for me, it was an upgrade.
My brand-new obsolete computer
I bought my last laptop in 2008, from an outfit called System76 that custom-builds computers running the Ubuntu operating system. I love Ubuntu, but that's the nicest thing I can say about my System76 laptop. It was expensive, the tech support was awful, and it had a fan like a wind turbine. Plus, its battery life was barely long enough for one class.
When its battery died altogether, just a little more than a year after I bought it, I knew that I needed a replacement. And since a replacement battery would cost over $100 for another year's worth of life, I started looking at new computers again in earnest.
Love at first sight
That's what it was, when I saw my Compaq Presario CQ62 on display. It was so sleek and shiny, so classy with its textured handrests. Then I saw the price tag and gaped. $350? Seriously?
The specs were barely adequate, but they were enough for me. And over the next few months, I'd see this particular model's price go down as low as $299. I snatched it up online for $315, so plus shipping and the cost of a backpack I paid $350 for the nicest computer I've ever owned.
What kind of specs?
My laptop has a 2.0 GHz single-core Celeron processor, 2 GBs of RAM and a 250 GB hard drive. But what're more interesting are what it doesn't have: A webcam or a memory card reader.
The thing is, I don't use camera memory cards, and I don't need a webcam, either. And for the things that I do with my laptop -- for the things that most people do with their laptops, really -- this one is more than enough. Heck, a five-year-old desktop computer will do most of what you want to do with one, these days. There haven't been any new, must-have hardware features added since then, just incrementally better performance. And that doesn't matter much unless you're a gamer, or a professional video editor, 3d modeler or programmer.
But is it really enough?
I tend to have a lot of tabs open in Chrome, so sometimes my laptop slows down as it deals with them. Plus Windows 7 boots up and logs out slowly, which is part of the reason why I installed Ubuntu instead. I'd probably also be disappointed in this machine if I liked to do webcamming, or play lots of games, or edit video from a Flip camcorder.
All I've ever needed a computer for, though, is to write and browse the web and play a few basic games. That's why I've been very happy with this one for the past year, and I expect to keep using it for a long while. And while I don't want to tell other people they don't need the machines that they paid for, I'm definitely going to be more skeptical of those salespeople's claims. After all, they get paid on commission.
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