Just before Eli was born, our computer broke.  Which was crappy timing, because once we brought the little guy home, we wanted to store and organize all of our new baby pictures and videos and such.  The computer that died on us was a Sony Vaio that I had bought back in early 2004.   Now I guess 6 years isn’t a terribly short shelf life, but with what I paid for the PC, I was not expecting it to go quite so suddenly.  The Geek Squad over at Best Buy told us the motherboard had gone, and to replace it would be as expensive as buying a new computer.

My impatience settled in, and I decided to get a quick and cheap new desktop.  My monitor and printer and everything still worked fine, so I didn’t need a whole new package.  Then I heard about Bing’s cashback promotion, and I saw an eMachines computer for sale at Walmart.com for $400.  The price was right, the specs looked good, so I bought it.  And as a bonus, the thing was delivered the next day!  Woot, right?!

Yeah, not so much.  A week later, the tower’s USB drives and memory card reader just stopped working.  Just like that.

Fortunately, I was able to return it with relative ease at a Walmart store.  Which, unfortunately, meant I had to actually go inside a Walmart store.  But it also means I am still without a replacement PC.

I was pretty close to buying a cheap HP from BestBuy.com, but it had a vertical DVD drive, and a lot of reviews said discs got stuck in there.  I’m currently leaning towards customizing a Dell (per Uri’s recommendation), which might cost a little more and take a little longer to arrive, but at least then I get just what I want.

Any other thoughts?