GeekTech: Ailing PC? Buy a New One!

GeekTech: Ailing PC? Buy a New One!
Tom Mainelli
In an age of disposable computers, sometimes it's easier, and cheaper, to buy new rather than repair old.
During a recent trip back to the Midwest to visit friends and family, I had a side job to accomplish: resuscitate my sister's comotose desktop PC.
It was one of those deals where the PC worked one day, and then the next it just didn't. It wouldn't boot. Heck, it wouldn't even turn on. She confirmed that all cables and power cords were plugged in. And she swore she hadn't poured a Coke into the system's innards.
Hmmmm. Well, I was out of ideas. Okay, not really. Before the trip I attempted to do some preliminary remote troubleshooting, with my Dad's help. I asked him to open the case and look to see if a green light was glowing on the motherboard (a task my sister wasn't comfortable doing). If that light was off, I reasoned, then maybe the power supply was dead. That's a simple enough fix, I thought. Unfortunately, the light was on.
"What about the power button?" I asked, definitely reaching a bit. He pushed the button. "It feels a little spongy," he said. And he would know, because he has the exact same eMachines system at home, purchased the same day, at the same store, two years earlier.
"Aha," I thought. "The whole PC is dead because one cheapo little part--the power button--stopped working."
Yeah, I knew that was probably just wishfully simplistic thinking (is it ever that easy?). But a guy has to hope, right?
The Trip HomeOne of the special things about this trip home was that, after more than 35 years in the same house in Omaha, Nebraska, my folks had just moved into the country home of their dreams. They'd been looking for a new place for so long I thought it was just a hobby, until they found a beautiful place about 30 miles away, just outside of Minden, Iowa, and bought it. This would be our first stay at the new house.
Life in the country can be peaceful and relaxing. One downside, however, is the complete lack of local computer parts stores. The nearest CompUSA is about an hour away from my parents' house, and the closest Fry's Electronics (a favorite superstore of many San Francisco Bay Area geeks like me) is, oh, like a thousand miles. My sister still lives in Omaha, but my Dad insisted I wasn't going to spend a day of my vacation there running back and forth to the store and trying to fix her PC, and I sort of agreed with that logic. So he transported the PC to their new house for me to try my one idea for a fix. I bought a new chassis with a power supply in Omaha before heading out to Minden, and figured I'd have the old eMachine purring away in its new body in no time.
An Unsuccessful TransplantI was wrong. Despite what appeared to be a successful transplant, the PC wouldn't boot in the new chassis, either. Clearly it wasn't the power button. More likely, it was the motherboard. My inclination was to replace the motherboard, but I didn't have one on me. Driving back to Omaha to get one wasn't a great option; and my stay wasn't long enough to wait for NewEgg to deliver--and paying overnight shipping on a cheapo motherboard seemed downright silly.
It's probably a good thing there wasn't a Fry's down the street, because the more I thought about it, the less sense it made to rebuild this PC. For one thing, my sister didn't have any must-save documents on the hard drive, and she didn't need the PC immediately for business use. Second, it was an ultra-low-end system when she bought it, and two years later the assorted components I was trying to salvage weren't exactly setting the world on fire.
Plus, if I installed a new motherboard I was fairly certain I wouldn't be able to use the eMachines restore disc, which meant I would need a Windows XP disc (and even I don't travel with one of those). And what if the problem turned out to be not the motherboard, but the processor or the RAM? Before long this little fix-it job could end up getting pretty pricey.
I declared the patient dead on the table, and urged my sister to move on.



Cheap, Cheap, CheapMy sister isn't interested in computing power. She has no interest in playing PC games. She doesn't really use the PC for anything but Web surfing, CD ripping, and the occasional check on Web-based e-mail (which she'd been accessing at work since her own PC died). She essentially had one requirement of her new PC: that it be cheap.
I was around when my parents and sister bought their eMachines two years earlier, and was amazed at how much PC they managed to get for $450. Today you can get even more, for substantially less--if you shop carefully.
I started off looking at Dell's Web site, where at first glance it appeared you could get a bare-bones, low-end Dimension PC for less than $300 (sans monitor). But that price applied only before you upgraded to enough RAM to actually run Windows XP well, increased the hard drive to a reasonable size, and then paid to have it shipped out. It's worth noting that Dell's price did include recycling your old PC, something my sister will have to deal with on her own.
That's because we found her next PC the way I suspect a lot of people find their computers: in the Sunday newspaper circulars. At Best Buy, to be precise. For just $350 (and no rebate nonsense) the store offered an HP Compaq Presario Media Center SR1910NX system with an AMD Sempron 3200+ processor, 512MB of memory, a 120GB hard drive, a DVD/CD-RW combo drive, nVidia 6150LE integrated graphics, and a 17-inch CRT. True, it wouldn't break any land-speed records, but it would do.
For an extra $100 you could even upgrade to an Athlon 64 3500+ CPU, a 200GB hard drive, a LightScribe DVD-RW drive, and a nine-in-one media card reader. That's a lot more computer for the extra dough, but, of course, she wouldn't hear of it.
My sister picked up her new PC in Omaha less than a week later. By that time I was back home in Northern California. She did call me during the setup, but not because she had problems plugging in the cables and booting the system (the PC companies have finally figured that out with clever color coding). She called with a question about Symantec Norton Internet Security.
A week later she phoned again to let me know that she was really enjoying her new PC. But she had one more question: How come she couldn't upload the more than 2000 songs on her iPod (ripped from her own CDs using her now-dead eMachine) to her new PC?
"Oh, that's a digital rights management issue," I said. "And that's WAY more complicated than a dead PC."

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