365 Pictures – 038 of 365 B
Image by clarkwoods
Kaylee and I checked out the iMacs at Best Buy this afternoon, during our trip to the Mall of New Hampshire. These two images were taken with the iMac’s built-in iSight camera and processed with a neat little app called Photo Booth.
Now, why were we checking out the iMacs, you’re asking? Well, our home computer has been on the fritz lately. The monitor has been exhibiting all the classic signs of CRT tube failure — pinched picture (imagine the after image in a Slim Fast ad, where the middle of the person suddenly contracts), et cetera — and the actual computer is exhibiting the signs of a power supply failure, among other things. So, we’ve been looking at buying a new computer. We can’t really afford it, but we really do need to have a working machine at home.
Here’s why: The Clarks – Working computer = no working from home for Chris. No working from home for Chris = no savings on daycare for Kaylee. No savings on daycare for Kaylee = not enough money for mortgage. Not enough money for mortgage = having to sell a house in need of a half-dozen repairs, in a bad real estate market, and probably losing money on our investment. And so on, and so forth.
We’ve been talking about making the switch to the Mac platform for years, and buying any other kind of computer at this point doesn’t make sense. We don’t need three or four more years of computer-envy, after all. And while the low-cost Mac Mini has some appeal, it doesn’t solve one of our major problems — lack of a fully-functional monitor. So, the iMac is what we’ve been looking at, and the 20 inch iMac to be specific (which is the middle-of-the-line for that line, but the biggest model that will fit within the confines of our beautiful rolltop desk), mostly because it comes with a bigger hard drive standard, and we have a lot of crap to store on our machine. It’s a more expensive computer, but a good friend of mine has always told me to "buy as much computer as you can afford", so that you don’t look back on your purchase in a year and wish you’d gone bigger and better.
This past Saturday, Stephanie and Kaylee and I went to the Apple Store in Salem, NH and checked out the machines. We asked tons of questions, and felt pretty good about moving forward. Stef wanted to get our taxes started before we made any purchase though, to see if maybe our return might help us out, and I thought that was a more than reasonable request, so we went home, and I did some more research.
I did a lot of research, actually. I wrote a list of every program we regularly use on the PC, and found a Mac equivalent for each of them. I researched booting Windows XP on the Mac, which is possible using Apple’s Boot Camp software. I solved the problem of what to do with the limited number of USB ports on the machine. I looked up about a thousand different things I was wondering about how this worked and how that worked. In short, I invested every spare moment I had, from Saturday through Tuesday, making sure I had all of our bases covered. I was excited. I knew that I could do the taxes on Wednesday morning, and that we’d be able to buy the machine this coming Saturday. That was my plan. It was set in stone.
And then…
On Wednesday, after finishing up the federal taxes and determining that we’d be looking at a pretty good return, I began to notice a change in the computer. It hadn’t turned off on its own all day. The fan on the power supply, which I’d degunked on Saturday with what had appeared to be no results, seemed to be spinning again, albeit not very hard. The monitor wasn’t having as many problems. It was as if the machine knew that we were about to replace it and decided, ‘Oh, okay, I’ll start working again.’
Sure, both of the internal DVD drives are still non-functional, but we bought an external drive with Christmas money to solve that problem, at least temporarily. Sure, the TV tuner is broken, but we don’t use it anyway. Sure, you have to bang the monitor now and then to get the picture to show up right, but that’s a small inconvenience, right? And sure, the power supply on the PC is still a little hotter to the touch than I would like, but the machine is working. It’s staying on. And as long as we turn off the computer when we’re away from the house, it’s not a fire hazard.
So should we really be thinking about buying a new computer now, when our old computer has decided to be good again? I guess not.
And I guess this should make me happy. I guess I should be elated that we’re not going to have to spend the money, that maybe we can focus on getting a new stove now instead (our oven hasn’t worked since 2005, though our stovetop burners are still functioning). But I was really looking forward to the new machine. I’ve been dreaming about getting one for years now, and I was so close…
The rational way of thinking about it is this: Daycare expenses will go down this summer, when Kaylee moves from the infant room to the toddler room. The new Mac OS is due out later in the spring, or early in the summer, as are new versions of their iLife and iWork suite of applications. Our current computer may last us that long, or even longer, and the longer it lasts us, the more we are able to dig ourselves out of debt and find a way of better affording it.
That’s the rational way of thinking about it. But I’m not in the mood to be rational right now. I’m not in the mood, at all.
