The prices are way down on laptops and the failure rate is rising just as fast. The cost cutting is evident, I have seen sturdier plastic used in KFC sporks. They flex, snap and shed their bits of plastic and no one blinks. “Well I did get it at Walmart for $198.00 on Black Friday”

Thats just great, and if your only use for your laptop is to surf the web, have at it. Here are the caveats, cheap laptops have cheap hard drives, if you live on the web and all your data is stored in a cloud by all means run fast and cheap and replace it every 14-16 months.

If you use outlook or quickbooks or have a huge iTunes collection and 137 gigs of pictures of your uncle Wally’s trip to Disney in 1993, then please back it all up!

Back it up now and in 2 places, send it to the ether using one of the online back up services and then put it on a local external hard drive and keep it where your laptop doesn’t live.

You have been warned…