One of my hobbies is refurbing laptops. I just had a very good Dell 600 series [2004] which lost its hard drive. I replaced the hard drive and gave it to a friend to operate his ham radio setup. The data on the crashed hard drive is being recovered onto an external hard drive [originally from a pentium 3 computer]. We have 4 other active laptops right now.

Two Dells with XP and a couple of HP's are active right now. The HP's are a mini 110 with Windows 7 for which I replaced the monitor and another DV2000 which got raised from XP to Windows 7.

We also have a couple of desktops with XP, One serves as the hub for our system. The other is a 10 year old "spare" which also operates the CD printer/burner that Brother Greenhaus gave me. Even a somewhat tired machine is better than spending a lot of money when starting a business.

Lady Hillary and I attended a rollout of some business software last May. They told us that the current business software would not work with XP. That made the decision easy for us. We need to be compatible with the others in our business network.

If we did not need to upgrade, the only computer we have that would have 7 would be the Mini. That came with 7.

Any decision you make should include the question of future compatibility.

What I am saying is that there is no real reason to replace a computer unless the cost of repair is greater than the cost of replacement. Even when the computer dies, just stick the old hard drive in an external drive casing and keep working.