Broken Laptop LCD - Repair or Replace?

My husband dropped my Dell laptop and broke the LCD. I'm torn between replacing the LCD (this isn't covered by my warranty so it would be out of pocket) or buying a new one. If you had the choice, what would you do?

how old is the laptop? 

It's 3 years old.

in that case, I would buy a new one rather than repair it (if you have the money, I don't know what the price differential is between repair and replace!)

edit: I'm a techie, though, which means I probably like to replace things more quickly than most.  It really depends on how happy you are with the performance of the laptop, I think or how eager you are to get something higher-spec.

hiya

I'm tending to agree with Springhaze here - but it does depend on which LCD panel is on the laptop and it's price and the labour charge to fit it. If it's a basic or mid range laptop, then it might not make such a good idea, if it's a high end or gaming type laptop then it could be worthwhile to fix.

I do know of a Dell repairer in NW london who's a good contact - if you do want to go down the repair route, I can PM you the details.

Cheers, DtM! West London & Slough UK!

i highly recommend replacing it, as repairs could run you about half the cost of a new one anyways!

If you're not a gamer, Dell has an inspire (i think that the name) line of casual use laptops for under 450 quid.  You can find these at PC world.

replace it - a three year old PC needs replacing anyway IMO

Screen replacements are usually a very large expense.  You could easily buy the same model on ebay for less than the cost of the replacement.  If it's a loose wire, than that's a different story, but by and large, I'd be looking for a new laptop.  3 years is at least 2 'cycles' for a laptop, and after 3 or 4 product cycles you'll start to have some limitation on what you can do with that machine given the new software that is out there.

But my general advice is always buy nearly the most powerful machine you can afford to ensure the longest lifespan.  Just my two cents.

I agree with the people who said "buy a new one". Progress is fast in the PC world, and in 3 years the amount of bang per buck has gone up a lot. CPU speed, memory size, battery endurance, lightness, hard drive size, power consumption, other features, etc. If the repair cost was 50% of the price of a new laptop, after 3 yrs I would rather put that money towards a new one. After all, everything else on the machine is now 3 yrs old. Assuming the laptop has a connector for an external monitor (most do) you can always use it as a desktop with a cheap LCD monitor, adding a keyboard and mouse via the USB. Of course the hard drive is likely to have files that you want to keep so that is something you would need to think about, you can get a repair shop to remove the disk and put it in an external drive case, or burn your data to DVD-Rs, for a reasonable fee.

After much waffling I went and bought a new Compaq laptop last night. It's pretty, it's shiny, it has Vista (ugh! - I have hopes that it will get better) and it'll keep me amused for a few days while I blitz all the unnecessary trial software. Maybe at some point I'll feel adventurous and swap out the LCD myself but not right now. I've already purchased a drive enclosure for the old laptop drive, just need some time to do the swap out.

BTW, I'm a techie and write code as my day job but I'm also cheap and up to my neck in other expenses which is why I posted the question. Thanks for all your responses.