The line between “I want” and “I need”

This line is becoming a little more blurry everyday regarding our home pc. I have already crossed over to that realm of “I need”, while AB has managed to stake his claim in the “I want” realm for the most part. However, today he admitted that he could easily be propelled into the “I need” world very easily when he attempts to load his modeling software for class onto our computer.

When simply loading software has become an issue, we know there is something wrong. I loaded TurboTax the other day. It took me two nights to accomplish the feat. The first night I worked at it for about 45 minutes and then stormed out and proclaimed the fact that “We NEED a new computer”. And TurboTax is quite basic.

AB assured me then that we did not in fact “NEED” a new computer and that he would take a look at it. Virus scan revealed no critters manifesting themselves in the silicon and copper junctions. Defragment and error check revealed nothing major. And how many times do we really need to pull programs off the computer when the available resources indicate nearly 50% of memory available?

I attempted the TurboTax install the following day and after 30 minutes and two reboots I did achieve success. (Followed by all smiles when I dumped the major details of our 2005 finances into TurboTax and it returned the statement “Your return is $37.”)

We have had the beast since the summer of 2001. We bought it from Gateway when I started writing my dissertation for grad school. It has served us well, but it is time to move on to something smaller. No huge honking (deep) monitor, a nice compact mini tower. *Sigh* I even configured the baby on Dell.com this morning. $1680 and no interest financing for a year.

Yet I cannot seem to pull AB over that line. As we sat in my car eating lunch today we listed off the other needs and wants. First on the list… my damned teeth. A good $3000 for those here in the very near future (once I actually SCHEDULE the appointment)… then a trip to Seattle for 3 days… a travel trailer or pop up camper… further down the list is land for a house. Then there are the “other things” that go along with buying a computer… new/different internet access… a computer hutch (I have a few picked out)… a webcam. Then there are our current debts that we are paying off. And couple all of this with the fact that we have no idea what is on the books for AB with jobs and school in the next year and I *have* to admit that as long as we can get this computer to work, it shall remain ours. All in all I spend so little time on the computer at home anyways. Still in my own head, a new computer and peripherals is on a mostly invisible timeline that will become a hard timeline when someday we will need to redecorate our third bedroom from its office/guest room state currently.

But… I am still holding out a glimmer of hope that AB’s prof will have provided him with the usual undeciferable mess of a program that he usually does that will send our computer careening over the edge with no hope of retrieval. (Must back up EVERYTHING before AB inserts the disk.)