I already had a new com­put­er priced out — One of the dual-core AMD Athlon X2 4400+ proces­sors (because 0.2 MHz isn’t worth a moth­er­fuck­ing $500 price jump) based on the Toledo core — mark­ing my switch to AMD, 2 gigs of super fast RAM, 200 gig SATA HDD (I decid­ed not to go dual for RAID 0 cause strip­ing appar­ent­ly does­n’t do much), the lat­est ATI Sapphire Radeon series — X850XT Platinum with dual DVI (I was think­ing of SLI nVidia cards, but then I’d want to buy two cards when upgrad­ing), a DVD burn­er, and one of the deluxe sock­et-939 Asus moth­er­boards. I even bought two 19″ flat pan­el mon­i­tors two months ago in antic­i­pa­tion of the sys­tem, and got my par­ents to front me for some of the cash.

Then my air con­di­tion­er broke. It’s one of those grey areas, where it would cost me $300 just to test for leaks (after spend­ing $100 to find out what was wrong in the first place). This, in turn, is to find out how much it would cost to fix it, which could be any­where from $300 to $1000. So instead of tak­ing the chance on a sev­en-year-old A/C that may break again next year, I decid­ed to put the mon­ey towards a new one. A brand-name one that would hope­ful­ly last me more than 10 years, with a 5 year parts/labor war­ran­ty and a 10 year war­ran­ty on the com­pres­sor coil.

Unfortunately, it’s going to cost me $3500. This means that instead of sav­ing for a com­put­er, I’ll be aim­ing to pay the A/C over the next six months. I could have stretched the pay­ment over a year, but it’d be at 5% inter­est, com­pound­ed month­ly. My finan­cial goals are being put on hold now. I don’t need a new com­put­er, although I could eas­i­ly take advan­tage of a dual-core desk­top, and it would cer­tain­ly be inspir­ing to use such a sweet machine to work on my projects with Aaron. This has only made me more deter­mined; I’m going to save all the mon­ey myself now, and think­ing over a longer term.