I've got to totally disagree with Andrew here. I had a laptop around $2500 and it ended up wearing out the pin that the ac cord plugs into. In order to fix this, the entire motherboard had to be replaced and this happened some 3 times, not counting the battery replacement that I got. The $400 warranty covered me for the 3 years i had it, which had something up around $3000+ worth of repairs. Since it was still under the warranty after the 3rd repair, it got junked out for a comparable laptop. Admitedly, this one is only about $1100 or so now, but it's got a lot of bonus features that my old laptop didn't have, plus pretty much better storage memory and just about anything else I can think of. I didn't have to pay a thing, and on top of that, they even threw in a USB hardrive shell that I was able to put my old laptop hardrive on so that I didn't lose any data and still use as an 60GB external drive. Some people might be boasting about their amazing $300GB external drives and such, but my laptop works just fine. Maybe you consider $1000 a year for a new laptop to be standard expenses, but not everyone feels that to be necessary.
For a second case, my sister got an MP3 player as a gift for christmas, it had an extended warranty. It has been replaced roughly 3 times under the same warranty. It started out as a 128M battery powered MP3 player. It now has been upgraded to a 2GB w/ rechargable battery, and I've even gotten money BACK each time through.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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I've got to totally disagree with Andrew here. I had a laptop around $2500 and it ended up wearing out the pin that the ac cord plugs into. In order to fix this, the entire motherboard had to be replaced and this happened some 3 times, not counting the battery replacement that I got. The $400 warranty covered me for the 3 years i had it, which had something up around $3000+ worth of repairs.
Since it was still under the warranty after the 3rd repair, it got junked out for a comparable laptop. Admitedly, this one is only about $1100 or so now, but it's got a lot of bonus features that my old laptop didn't have, plus pretty much better storage memory and just about anything else I can think of. I didn't have to pay a thing, and on top of that, they even threw in a USB hardrive shell that I was able to put my old laptop hardrive on so that I didn't lose any data and still use as an 60GB external drive.
Some people might be boasting about their amazing $300GB external drives and such, but my laptop works just fine. Maybe you consider $1000 a year for a new laptop to be standard expenses, but not everyone feels that to be necessary.
For a second case, my sister got an MP3 player as a gift for christmas, it had an extended warranty. It has been replaced roughly 3 times under the same warranty. It started out as a 128M battery powered MP3 player. It now has been upgraded to a 2GB w/ rechargable battery, and I've even gotten money BACK each time through.