For electronics (and everything else) I'm usually in the "use them until they don't work for what I'm trying to do" camp. The only reason that I'm fairly up to date now is the fire, and the nice young man who checked out the electronics for the insurance company. He pretty much just went through and said that none of it could be expected to work, at least for long, what with the smoke and the water. And he threw in some old monitors and printers that, to be honest, weren't working much to start with.
And, while I'm usually painfully honest, I didn't even feel guilty, since the insurance adjuster had been really chintzy about the books. And I was right about the books, since even with multiple times in a little tent with the ozone generator, and a lot more care with that and careful and lengthy airing out than their cleaning company would have done, the books still smell like smoke.
So we got to start over with computers, printers and extra monitors. I did a lot of research, and laptops were by far the best buy, even compared to building desktops from scratch. Then I researched the laptops, and ended up with the Acer (in part because I needed the touchscreen) and the Lenovo ThinkPad.
With my hand problems I can't use the phone for anything that involves typing. In fact the only reason that I moved up to a smart phone was seeing my daughter use the satellite map functions to get us unlost from really obscure country roads with only one small error. And I use the phone for reading when I don't have the tablet with me, and I do have an app that looks like it will be very helpful for keeping track of too many meds on different dosing schedules. I'd just gotten that before the ankle fiasco, so I haven't had much chance to use it, but it promises to ring annoying alarms for each medicine dose until I tell it that I took each dose. And to track when I need which refills.
And, while I'm usually painfully honest, I didn't even feel guilty, since the insurance adjuster had been really chintzy about the books. And I was right about the books, since even with multiple times in a little tent with the ozone generator, and a lot more care with that and careful and lengthy airing out than their cleaning company would have done, the books still smell like smoke.
So we got to start over with computers, printers and extra monitors. I did a lot of research, and laptops were by far the best buy, even compared to building desktops from scratch. Then I researched the laptops, and ended up with the Acer (in part because I needed the touchscreen) and the Lenovo ThinkPad.
With my hand problems I can't use the phone for anything that involves typing. In fact the only reason that I moved up to a smart phone was seeing my daughter use the satellite map functions to get us unlost from really obscure country roads with only one small error. And I use the phone for reading when I don't have the tablet with me, and I do have an app that looks like it will be very helpful for keeping track of too many meds on different dosing schedules. I'd just gotten that before the ankle fiasco, so I haven't had much chance to use it, but it promises to ring annoying alarms for each medicine dose until I tell it that I took each dose. And to track when I need which refills.
