The Four Options of the Digital Apocalypse

It's time to solve a problem which has been plaguing my computer since the first week of this blog (and in fact pre-dates it by several months).

My Christmas wish of money-for-a-new-computer quickly became money-for-a-down-payment-on-gasoline-to-drive-to-the-computer-store, and therefore I am left pondering my own desires and finances and more importantly desire to continue to have finances. Here, in a nutshell, are the four options I've been looking at:

  1. Do nothing.
    This is (naturally) the cheapest of the four options. Namely, don't buy anything new. Don't make any changes. Keep with the lousy computer setup I have right now and deal with it until I get a huge raise or a new job or a heads-up on future lottery numbers. It's the most practical solution, but it doesn't really solve anything, unless "solve" is shorthand for "accepting that I'm horrendously poor and there's nothing I can do when I barely can afford rent"

  2. Buy a new hard drive.
    I really should have thought of this one earlier. If the problem is an incompatibility between my "new" 300GB Western Digital hard drive, and my "old" ASUS A7A266 motherboard, why not simply get a new "new" hard drive? Memory Express sells 320GB Seagate hard drives for $115. The benefit is that for a small financial cost, I should have a working computer. The downsides are that there's a chance this new hard drive might not be the solution I was hoping for (ie. it might be incompatible in the same way...or a worse way), and that at the end of the day all I get is my system working normally again: a vast improvement over what I have now, but not very flashy to get me back to 2001-era speeds.

  3. Upgrade current tower.
    Now we're talking, plopping down some real cash to get a real system: perhaps a nice AMD Athlon 64+ X2 dual-core. A nice improvement from my 1.4GHz Thunderbird, finally in the area where I get a system upgrade. There are a couple small problems with this. For one, a new Socket AM2 motherboard will use DDR2, rather than DDR, for its RAM. Ergo, more money must be spent. Similarly, a new motherboard will use PCI-Express rather than AGP for its graphics card. Either stick with the onboard graphics card (an improvement over my Geforce 4, to be fair), or buy a new graphics card. At the end of the day, we get a Frankensystem:
    If you're talking about a PC that's several years old, upgrading the motherboard with a new motherboard, an inexpensive new CPU in an advanced technology family, and some DDR-2 or DDR memory, is equivalent to building a new PC with a slowish video card and drives. You'll really see the difference, you'll be in a great position to upgrade the rest, but why not just build a new one from scratch?
    A AMD64X2 processor runs in the $220 range, at least $100 for a decent motherboard, and thanks to the RAM problem an extra $135 for a stick of DDR2 RAM from A-Computers. That's at least $450 to upgrade this system, which at the end of the day might not be worth it.

  4. Buy a new laptop.
    Ahhh, the sweet smell of money falling out of my bank account. This is a flat expense in the $1050-range. $1039.90 for an Acer laptop with a 160GB hard drive and a Turion TL-50 dual-core processor. $1039.95 for an Aspire laptop with a 120GB hard drive and the TL-50 processor. Of course, this is a huge chunk of cash. Now in theory a notebook is like an import car: you pay more up front in return for keeping the resale value high. In reality: lots of people are selling used laptops for 40-60% the original purchase price, but nobody's actually buying them. Still, this is a tempting method. The problem, naturally, is that buying a new laptop puts you at the mercy of the paradigm-changing spending spree. To paraphrase Thomas Kune, suddenly you're a "laptop person". Next thing you know, you've spent $50 on a wireless router. $60 for a carrying case. $100 for backup batteries. $90 on a docking station. $75 for a privacy filter. Ooh, can't forget the Edmonton Oilers Notebook Cover from Dell, only $30! Pocket USB Numeric keypad for $30 too. $50 for the external USB floppy drive. It's all fun and games until you've blown a small fortune on laptop accessories.
Which of these 4 options will I choose from? I've yet to decide, but will keep you posted.