In a world where it is almost cheaper to buy a new notebook than to repair an old one, JOHN HARRIS asks how we can justify keeping old technology.

Despite my best efforts to stay away from computers during the Christmas  break, I ended up pulling a couple of all-nighters at the keyboard.

I successfully resisted the temptation of messing with my own notebook, but my wife’s five-year-old Toshiba broke down while my daughter Eden’s first notebook needed to be configured and backed up.

To start with, I tried to outsource the troubled Toshiba by dropping in with it to ever-affable Robin Sinko at Laptop World on Glynburn Road.

Unfortunately, after 20 minutes of diagnosis, Robin told me there was nothing wrong with the notebook’s processor or memory, so the regular crashing was likely due to a software problem.

That night, I installed a fresh version of Windows XP on to the machine, which worked fine except for lacking the Toshiba-specific software and drivers.

At 11pm, I located a set of recovery disks created when the machine was new, which I installed with all the required drivers. The notebook crashed within seconds of starting!

About 1am, I went back to Plan A, to re-install the vanilla version of Windows XP, although I was too tired to add the drivers manually by the time the install finished at 3am,

Quite separately, last weekend, my dear mother and daughter connived on a plan for granny to buy Eden her first notebook or netbook.

After hunting around, we found an HP Compaq Presario with Windows 7, two gigs of RAM and a 250-gig hard drive at Officeworks for $577 – a price point that put it smack in the middle of the tiny netbooks with better performance and much greater flexibility.

It’s a sweet little machine that was quick to configure, including Skype for its built-in web camera.

In tandem, I tracked down and installed drivers on to my wife’s notebook, a process that took more hours than I care to admit (but finished about 2am Tuesday).

Now both machines are working fine, although I feel pretty sleep-deprived on my first day back at work.

The conundrum is whether it was worth reinstalling the software on my wife’s ageing notebook when I could buy a brand new replacement for less than $600.

My obsessive compulsive streak says yes: The more rational part of my brain says that cheap notebooks are an almost throwaway commodity.

And there’s the rub for anyone with even a passing concern for the environment.

How can skilled technicians like Robin at Laptop World justify spending several hours to repair an old notebook for $200-$300 when it costs little more to buy a new computer?

The cost of this throwaway mentality is an ever-increasing volume of e-waste where computers and other electronic devices are turfed out – unwanted by even church fetes or goodwill stores – rather than nursed along for years more of potentially useful life.

The green answer may be to seek our inner geek by fuelling PCs with midnight oil through Zen and the art of computer maintenance.

John Harris is managing director of Impress Media Australia. Email jharris@impress.com.au.

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