The Demise of Our Computers

The past 12 months have been a very bad time for computers in our house. One year ago we had two desktop PCs, one for myself and one for my husband, as well as my laptop. Over the summer of 2010 my desktop died a slow death. It started with sporadic episodes of not turning on where I would have to hit the power button a dozen times. Then one day it just stopped powering up altogether. I may have freaked out a bit as all of my photos over the past 6 years as well as all of my music were on there. We took it apart and discovered that the processor is what kicked the bucket. My husband hooked up my hard drive to his desktop and luckily everything was still there. So I was able to transfer everything to an external hard drive – YAY! Then a week or so ago, his desktop stopped working and in his case, it was his hard drive. So now we have a pieced together PC using my old hard drive and his processor. Needles to say it isn’t working very efficiently. So we may be turning to HP soon for a new device as it is very hard for us to both work on just my laptop. I’ve been browsing their site a bit and I am happy to see many of their products are Energy Star. So now the decision becomes do we purchase a traditional desktop, a tablet pc or something more mobile like laptops or netbooks? I think I am leaning towards a second laptop, it just seems the most practical for us. What type of computer do you use?