I bought my E6500 almost three years ago, giving away what was a perfectly good Latitude to trade up to the latest and greatest, including a 64G SSD. It’s been a good machine, runs Windows 7 without issue and even though I hibernate the machine daily, the SSD still goes on. I wasn’t at all sure that a 64G drive would be enough. I’ve had to prune files a couple times a year, but it’s been plenty for the stuff I use and need on a daily basis.

I thought about this only because my wife had asked if I wasn’t due to get a new machine, usually every couple years. I looked it over and it’s in pretty good shape, missing the “T” key where my baby girl decided to do some remodeling, and I just moved the tilde key over to replace the more often needed T. I looked a little closer and saw a small crack in the display bezel, not critical, and surely my fault from rough handling, but really it’s held u well.

I looked up the order to see when I bought it and saw that it was still under warranty and accident damage protection,just barely. I called Dell and a technician is supposed to come by this week to replace the screen and keyboard (they said I could keep the old keyboard for spares!). Neither is critical and if I had to pay for the repairs I wouldn’t,but with them I think I can go a while on this machine.

I spent about $2k on this one, and even then debated the merit of $2k versus going with a yearly spend of $600 or so on a lower grade use and discard plan once a year, but it’s worked out ok. I did a quick price check to see what I could get today, and the same machine (with 128G SSD, no 64G option, and 8G ram instead of 4g) was $1400 with the i5, a couple hundred more for the i7.

I’m in no hurry to buy, if anything I’d like to wait on one that can go to 16G or more to do better running VM’s, but at about $500/year for three years I like even better my strategy to buy a good machine and keep it versus an ok machine that may break. The math is fuzzy of course, I could well buy a $600 machine that would last 3 years, and even if it only lasts two I’m ahead. Still, in this case I’ll stick to what works, which right now anyway is my not quite three year old laptop!