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Hi guys, I've finally recovered and am back in action.

And after two weeks in the shop so is my computer.

For those of you who don't know, my family's computer is a 9 1/2 year old gateway that uses an AMD anthlon processor from yesteryear (it was supposed to be equivalent to a pentium 4 processor).

Going without a pc for two weeks is hard, and it's becoming abundantly clear my pc's time is nearly up. So I'm left with an interesting decision.

One of my friends and one of my professors has agreed that building a new computer may be the way to go. But my folks are extremely attached to the old computer. So I was thinking maybe I could get my friend and professor's help in rebuilding the old computer from the inside.

It needs memory and a new processor at the very least. It might be a bit expensive, but then again we just spent over $200 to repair it the last time. So the money involved in rebuilding it would be more of an investment than anything else.

So what do you guys think?
Should I buy a new computer? Should I build a new computer? Or should I rebuild the current computer?

If the cost of repairing the computer is equal to or more than getting a new one, I suggest getting the new one, and using flash drives to transfer your stuff over from the old one.

Otherwise, repair the old one.

yup it all comes down to cost efficiency.

The house we live in barely has room enough to compensate for one computer. And since there are only two phone outlets in our house (both of which are being used), we can't hook a second computer to the internet.

Right now the cheapest option would probably be to buy a whole new computer (minus monitor) which would run about $400. But it's the least likely to get approval from my folks. There's also a chance we may end up with another dud like the current computer if we buy from gateway or dell. If that's the case we will be spending $200 dollars 2 or 3 times a year to keep it running.

The second cheapest option would be to upgrade the current computer, which would probably cost about $400 or $500. This is also the option most likely to be approved by my folks.

The most expensive option would be to build a completely new computer from scratch, which would run $650 to $700. Of the three options this one would probably run the most efficiently and would probably require less upkeep than a new computer bought from a store.

A laptop is more trouble than it's worth. It can't be on for long enough periods of time.

If it can't be on for at least 6 hours without a break it's of no use to me.

I think there are cooling platforms that you can get for laptops....I have seen them...But I don't know how well they work. sweatdrop

Well it turns out we can't upgrade our computer even if we want to.

Gateway built our computer so we could only ever get memory from them, so any older form of memory that we could find in a store would be incompatible with our system.

So we are going to have to buy a new one instead. A computer savy friend found a good computer that meets our specs and that can be easily upgraded if desired later on.

I think they did declare bankruptcy.

Not that it matters much, they closed up shop in our neck of the woods quite some time ago.