{"id":22536,"date":"2014-03-17T13:50:21","date_gmt":"2014-03-17T18:50:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=22536"},"modified":"2014-03-17T15:04:38","modified_gmt":"2014-03-17T20:04:38","slug":"crowdsourcing-advice-result","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=22536","title":{"rendered":"Crowdsourcing Advice: Result"},"content":{"rendered":"

So last month<\/a> I mentioned that my son’s laptop died, and I asked for some advice on what to get and what to avoid. We got some good feedback and got him a reasonable machine without breaking our budget. (Some people even threw a few bucks at us via paypal to help with the purchase. Thanks!) I didn’t think about it again until last week when someone emailed me and asked for a follow-up. It didn’t even occur to me that I’d sort of left you hanging.<\/p>\n

So for the curious, here is what happened…<\/p>\n

Our big concern was price. I know a lot of advice from people centered around the idea of “you know, you can get a LOT more power for just a LITTLE more money”. Which is true, but that’s sort of always true at these lower price levels. <\/p>\n

Aside: See, it’s tax time, and tax time can be tough on self-employed types who don’t have their taxes automatically withdrawn. We have a savings account where we set aside money for paying taxes at the end of the year, but I totally forgot to allow for the fact that we’re no longer homeowners<\/a>. In the US, the interest on mortgage payments is tax-deductible but rent isn’t. So suddenly we’ve got thousands of dollars of tax liability that we didn’t plan for. We’re fine now and we managed to get everything paid, but in the meantime we just did not have the money for buying computers.<\/p>\n

So that’s why we were shopping on the inefficient low side of the price\/performance curve.<\/p><\/div>\n

But here is what we got him, which came as a bundle:<\/p>\n