My 2 year old Acer notebook died. The motherboard fried. It would have cost 250-350 bucks to replace (out of warranty). I said '-bleep- that'. I got offered 50 bucks for the parts. Put that toward getting a preowned Gateway computer tower with 3 GB RAM, 200 GB HDD, and such for 300 bucks. And a 2 year service warranty for 50 bucks. Bad buy? Maybe. I hear 'oh, you should have bought a Dell laptop for 400 bucks brand new' coming left and right. Well, Dell is the bargain-bin equivalent of computers and laptops, folks. FYI, if you own an Acer or Hewlett Packard, be very careful. especially with the laptops. Those things are so small.

Red Ring of Death? For Acer, it's the flashing Green Ring of Death.

Anyway, I got internet back, and at least I can access the internet MUCH FASTER than before on the tower versus my laptop (this is through a wire for both cases too, folks). Plus...instead of having a 160 GB HDD split up in two drives, I got one set up for all 190 available gigs. But...I dunno. Dell is so-so. If I didn't hate how poorly their computers were maintained at my college, and therefore hate Dells in general, I might have gotten one.