They don't build 'em like they used to...

I always believed I was one of the very few who's never has a PSU go on them. I've had a PC since the good old days of 386's and 100W PSU's, and through out that time I have never experienced a PSU failure. I have known the majority of my mates experience the unpleasent and untimely event of a PSU dieing but I never have. Well tonight time caught up with me. After a particulary grueling day in the office I came home to do some more coding only to find my beloved Enterprise was experiencing technical difficulties in the powering up and doing anything remotely useful front. Damn was not my first choice of words to describe how I felt but it will do. I decided at this point rather than go a bit nuts and rip it apart in fury to go have a good old english "brew" and come back to it. Well to cut a long story short in about 20 mins i had gutted my PC back to PSU, Mobo, CPU and Mem only to find it as useful as a feather paperweight. In other words useless. At this point I beginning to doubt the workmanship of my Abit motherboard, as my model has had some ropey reviews and support issues, alas out tail doen't end here, I decided as anyone would to hunt around in my closest of techy junk and found my old 300W PSU. So armed with an old, questionable make and model 300w PSU tried to boot my barebones PC. Low and behold it fired up and started puring as it does on most days. So here I am sat on my works really slow Compaq tablet pondering the future for my PC, I turned to Scan and considered buying a new PSU on my credit card to arrive Friday so I can get it back up and running and actually be able to do some hard work. However i noticed on the Antec site that they have a limited 3 Year warranty on their products, my initial thoughts were to sod the RMA off as I could be PC less for weeks however I'm sad to say my cheap skate 'ness has taken hold of me and rather than spend £60 on a lovely silent PSU, I'm going to wait goodness how long for tech support to give me an RMA and get a lovely refurbished PSU that will no doubt last only 12 months and take me past my original warranty date. All for the sake of £60. Why is it that electrical components seem to be so short lived nowadays? Electrical components used to last for what seemed an age, nowadays we seem to accept cheap, defective and guaranteed short life span all for a few £££. Are we as a culture happy with products that work for a 12 months all for the sake of saving a few pennies? That is a question that I believe we must all ask ourselves, and if the answer is no then we as consumers need to change corporate mentality.