Equal parts higher-ed IT, web dev and support; with a dash of freelance consulting thrown in for good measure. (Oct/19: Seeking change of pace. Not afraid to take a step back in order to move ahead!)
Can you add more RAM and/or swap the hard drive for a SSD? If your computer is physically in good shape--keyboard, display and hinges--it might be worth your while to squeeze a bit more life from your current hardware...not to mention that it's cheaper than buying a whole new computer.
For example, I'm running a 6 year old Lenovo Thinkpad T520 that started it's life with 4 Gig RAM and a 320 Gig 7200rpm hard drive. Its second-generation i5-2520m processor still has plenty of oomph for an IDE, office suite, LAMP-stack and virtual machines (VirtualBox, Vagrant). Rather than buy a new machine, over the years, I've maxxed out the RAM to 16 Gig, traded the hard drive for a SSD, and most recently added an M2 SSD (so the OS lives there, and my data is on the SSD).
I've been contemplating buying a new machine for the past year, and just can't bring myself to do so when there's technically nothing wrong with mine. :)
Can you add more RAM and/or swap the hard drive for a SSD? If your computer is physically in good shape--keyboard, display and hinges--it might be worth your while to squeeze a bit more life from your current hardware...not to mention that it's cheaper than buying a whole new computer.
For example, I'm running a 6 year old Lenovo Thinkpad T520 that started it's life with 4 Gig RAM and a 320 Gig 7200rpm hard drive. Its second-generation i5-2520m processor still has plenty of oomph for an IDE, office suite, LAMP-stack and virtual machines (VirtualBox, Vagrant). Rather than buy a new machine, over the years, I've maxxed out the RAM to 16 Gig, traded the hard drive for a SSD, and most recently added an M2 SSD (so the OS lives there, and my data is on the SSD).
I've been contemplating buying a new machine for the past year, and just can't bring myself to do so when there's technically nothing wrong with mine. :)
Not willing to update my old machine, thanks for the suggestion. :)