Our temporary computer compromise

September 2, 2008 · Posted in Frugal Spending

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Well, our Dell is still dead. Because we had to deplete our emergency fund to pay for truck repairs, we’re not comfortable with buying a new computer before restoring our savings. In addition, there is a good chance that we are going to have to make a trip home this month for family reasons, and we haven’t saved up for that yet.

However, we do have some data that we need to get off the old computer, and we currently don’t have the required hard drive space on the Mac. So we decided to compromise. We purchased an external hard drive that is both Mac and PC compatible for $95 (we will get 5% cash back, but we’re not counting that right now). We also used an Amazon gift certificate to get the cable ($20) needed to connect our laptop hard drives to our current computer via a USB port. I was thinking of an external hard drive enclosure, but we have two different hard drives that are two different sizes. In addition, if we sell the laptop at a later time, the hard drive enclosure wouldn’t be worth the cost.

The external hard drive will be useful to us even after purchasing a new computer. I think that it’s a good temporary solution until we get back on our feet financially.

Would you have done the same thing? Why or why not?