The first few hours of my day were spent panicking and praying to various deities that my nearly 6 year old laptop would boot up to the familiar cluttered desktop I normally spend 16+ hours a day on. It's an older Asus laptop and it's been my workhorse for over half a decade.

While my laptop sat in a bootloop caused in part by a Windblows 8.1 update and partially due to a jammed cooling fan it donned on me that my backups of nearly everything were outdated... and if I was unable to get the laptop to boot again I basically would have lost access to all of my Bitcoin as well as a number of accounts I have here on Steemit for other projects. I don't have a bank account like most people. 100% of my monetary worth is in crypto currencies. While this may seem crazy to some I trust banks less than I trust cryptography, nuff said.

Backup ALL THE THINGS! (or regret it thoroughly later)

Needless to say I've spent the past few hours backing up the information I need in case of catastrophic laptop failure. While my computer is my lively-hood eventually it is going to cease to function and instead of fretting that day I'd like to replace it before it completely kicks the bucket. Certainly going to be backing up all of my important documents more often now that I've had this scare. Hopefully this laptop holds out until I can afford to replace it.

Now... Should I Save for a Desktop Rig or Laptop?

In order to have the STEEM community aide me in my choice of laptop or custom PC build I feel it's important to share a bit about my computer usage on a day to day basis.

First off, I'm an avid gamer and when I do allow myself free time I enjoy nothing more than losing a few hours in a video game. As a current laptop owner I'm rocking an AMD A8 processor on 8GB of RAM... Hardly a gaming rig but the integrated GPU on the A8 does allow me to play most games on low/medium as long as they are properly optimized. The biggest perk of course with the laptop setup is mobility.. with that being said up until this year I was very nomadic in nature and it made no sense for me to cart around a huge PC rig. With my times of homelessness and poverty slowly fading away in memory in favour of hard work and dedication the option of building a PC rig makes itself far more attractive.

Next comes cost compared to specs. I'm not a rich man by any means so getting the most value out of my hard earned dollar is important to me. With laptops you generally spend a bit more for the same specs you'd find on its desktop counterpart which always sort of boggled my mind.. The laptop seemingly has less material needed to be manufactured. Realistically I'd like to build a PC rig or purchase a laptop that has specs greater than this current unit I'm on right now and would like to keep the budget < $500 if possible (excluding case). I've already got a 750w power supply sitting here from my short lived career in Bitcoin mining so right there I've already saved $60-$80 on the custom PC rig build alone assuming the 750w corsair supply is beefy enough to power these newer CPU & GPU's.

Thirdly comes usability and earning potential, While I'm entirely aware that mining on laptops is a fools endevour I briefly mined on my current unit with some success on a few small crypto projects I was involved with early on. I'll never advise anyone follow suit with this as it WILL damage your GPU/CPU and other components if you've not adequate cooling and temperature monitoring. Living in Canada does have it's perks when it comes to crypto mining in the winter months (Get paid to heat your house) and if I can find a motherboard that allows multiple GPUs perhaps a dedicated mining card could be saved up for and purchased in the future. If somehow I was able to reimburse myself the cost of building the PC rig over the course of a few years mining was feasible I'd gladly go that route.

Know of any Deals, PC Build Hacks or Affordable Resellers?

If you've got some sweet advice on where to look for PC parts or laptops and would like to share the info with me please comment below. While I've still got a while yet before I can save up enough money to start seriously looking to purchase anything leads on where the best deals are to be had are greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading and helping me decide!

My Savings Goal and Budget

The hope and goal is to be able to find an affordable laptop or PC build parts for around $500. I know I'm not going to be getting anything top of the line for this price but at the end of the day I only need something that will serve it's purpose and keep me online so I can keep working on various STEEM projects. My laptop could very well just cease to boot up on next restart and the need to save up and invest in a new PC before this one is completely unusable is nearly uncomfortable. Within the remainder of the year I'd like to have the money saved up to replace this laptop so I can retire it still in semi-working condition for later use rather than find myself without a development rig and income.

Please feel free to comment below on your budget PC build, how you go about saving for looming expenses and what the best ways to earn money for an artist / web developer / general weido are. Thanks for reading and your advice / leads ahead of time!