Things you do for love

At the risk of jinxing them, I swear I have a magic laser printer cartridge and a magic laptop. 

The cartridge for my Brother HL-1440 Laser Printer is rated at 6,000 pages but I am sure it has gone longer. And I got it on sale for $50. My Toshiba Satellite M55-S135 which I paid $ 1,000 for has lasted me almost 2 years. What's so great about that? With my travel it has survived torture of at least 200 airports, thousands of hours of airline dryness, changing pressure and bumps, more bumps in rental cars, many 220V jolts etc etc.

So my wife wants brochures for her business. Kinkos wants 90c each (has anyone else noticed Kinkos has become pretty pricey since Fedex acquired them?). Someone recommends the HP 2605DN. Great small business color laser. Superb colors, two sided printing, network connectivity. Get it on sale for $ 374.99. But ....it needs not one, but 4 cartridges (1 black, 3 color). Each priced at over $ 80 each, and each with a supposed yield of only 2,000 pages. But at "5% coverage" and after 500 pages, all 4 cartridges are almost half empty. By my calculation that makes it 40X more expensive per page than myblack and white Brother. The box came with the first set of cartridges so we are set for a while, but it almost makes sense to  just throw it away after that. Or lock it up, as BusinessWeek pointed out, in the same cabinet as the 1990 Dom Perignon -)

Then my daughter pours water on her HP laptop. It was long in the tooth, but I had hoped to avoid going to Vista for a while. So, I get her a new Toshiba. And it runs like a dog. Clearly needs a lot more memory with Vista. So I go to BestBuy with every intention of getting a refund, and they save the day by offering me a deal. Another 1 GB of memory, installed for $ 50. Takes 30 minutes and while I am talking to the Geek Squad rep, I get the sinking feeling. Way too many apps, they have seen in the last 3 months,  are not compatible with Vista. Indeed there is a big sign which warns you of that. Why not continue to offer XP machines, I ask? "Our deal with Microsoft does not allow us to sell XP machines in stores. We can on-line". I can see why Microsoft is eager to get Vista rolling. But at what cost?

My family has pushed me into 2 purchases that I had hoped to avoid for a long time.

As the song goes

"You lay your bets and then you pay the price
The things we do for love...."

Update: Zoli points out more ways we overpay for cartridges.