It's sad when a trusted companion dies. Like my poor, inoffensive laptop, which blew out its monitor at Boston Logan airport two weeks ago.
I would rather not have just ordered a new computer to replace it. I will try to get the old laptop's monitor fixed, but the time, effort, and expense involved almost don't justify it. Everything else still works just fine; in fact, I'm using it now with an external monitor. In order to get it fixed I'd need to hand it over to strangers for an unknown length of time, which means removing all the security features, encryption, and data from the thing—a process that would require a complete hard drive wipe and then take hours to restore when I get it back.
(If that seems over the top, then you don't understand computer security.)
This brings me to the conundrum I hope I've resolved appropriately. My current laptop is a Dell Latitude D620, which replaced a Latitude D610, which replaced a Latitude D600. All three share parts, spare batteries, media bay devices, power supplies, etc., meaning I have quite a collection of Latitude D600-series peripherals.
Only, Dell no longer makes 600-series laptops. The last model in the series, the D630, they discontinued a few months ago. The logical replacements are the E5400 and E6400 models, which have similar characteristics but brand-new chassis that don't support my existing 600-series parts.
At this writing Dell had five D630s left in their factory outlet store, where they sell refurbished and scratch-and-dent leftovers. They have a ton of refurbished E6400s, though, for about $50 more.
Thus, the conundrum: buy the discontinued model for which I have all those parts, or go to the new series.
What to do?