Moving Music and Other Hazards

So yesterday I blew hours of my life on my laptop. Okay, so that is not anything new, look at me now! But yesterday was different because rather than cruising around blogs, I was chained to the fertile ground known as my operating system. I am trying, technological neophyte that I am, to boost my laptop's performance so that I can get another year or two out of my laptop.

If I spend $3,000 (with memory upgrades and Microsoft Office) on a laptop that lasts 5 years, that works out to a cost of $50 a month. Which is easy enough to save for each month in an online savings account, despite Bernanke's love affair with bottom feeding interest rates. Better yet, next time I think I will get a refurbished laptop. I've heard from a fellow Mac addict that Apple replaces the entire innards of their computers when refurbishing-- it costs them less than rooting around for that one thing gone wrong. So if I can bring that number down to $2,000, that's a monthly cost over five years of just a hair above $33. But the trick is to blow your wallet on the original purchase, and have restraint during your laptop's trusty service. And that's the hard part.

I don't buy the new operating systems, so I have Panther, but Tiger and Leopard have skipped right by me. The other day I wanted to download music from Amazon, but I couldn't because I needed at the very least the operating system that came right after mine. So now I'm rethinking my idea not to buy new operating systems. Maybe it would have let my laptop go for six years? Anyway, to make a long story short(er), I decided to move my music library off my laptop and over to an external hard drive. I have over 5,000 songs on my computer. And for some reason, yesterday I poured over 8,000 songs onto the hard drive. More than half my songs duplicated. That will be fun to delete out...

So this will be part of an ongoing series of posts, how to make one of my biggest purchases (face it, I don't lay down a few thousand dollars for one object all that frequently) last as long as possible. And sadly, moving my music library hasn't gone quite as planned. On a theoretical level I don't even understand how my iTunes library works on my laptop in conjunction with the external HD! (sigh)

photo by Hezi Cohen via flickr