Quote:
Originally posted by rlbell
Speaking as a parent, I find your suggestion loathsome in the extreme...
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Jeez dude, that's exaggerated hypocrite talk, even from a parent. Just don't say you never did anything like this when you were young. <_< A little cunning won't do any harm to anybody. That ancient relic of electronic history would brake sooner or later anyways, and I didn't said anything about intentionally destroying it. In fact, I adviced him not to, because there could be important data in there for his parents too. And what's good in just faking the malfunction is that can be easily reversed if needed with no permanent damage and without trace. Without some cunning he will fail in life for sure, the world is cruel.
Second, I think you noticed the very first thing I said in this thread, don't you? I said that this is a "last resort" thing when everything else fails, like begging, whining, trying to get more money outta parents...etc, and this is just an advice not a rule. I totally agree with all the other ideas here like bartering with parents or ask for a loan or something.
But the thing is, if he want to get a computer that would still be competitive in the next few years to come, he will need some serious $. A computer is an unremunerative investment. It burns your money away just to keep it up and running and performance-efficient, it's a constant expense. But thanks to that, prices are degrading fast, so he can get a mildly reasonable computer at a pretty fair price. That is if he just want's to use it to office work and DOS games. Newer programs will laugh at that setup and they will only produce a slide-show as framerate....
I do this by buying a fairly top of the line computer and use it until it becomes obsolete, say 3-4 years at most, at that time prices of newer parts will sink to a reasonable level so I can buy some top notch parts from my 3-4 year savings. I think it is a good strategy, at least it works for me. But for this he will need a top of the line computer first worth a small fortune. I done this by not asking anything for birthdays and christmas for 2 years so it added all up and I could finally buy my brutally powerful beast of a computer (that was a PII 333Mhz at that time
). Since then I do it as I told you, upgrading every 2-3 years only but with top grade stuff...