Should I get an extended warranty on my laptop?

Question

The laptop will be £650 (about $1300) and the extended warranty £269 for four years (bout $530).
It seems expensive but it will include accidental damage. Even if nothing happened, just before it runs out I can smash it and they will give me vouchers for the equivalent at that time. Will this equivalent actually be less than the 269 I paid.

(its an acer, got 2gb RAM, 1.6GHz dual core, 160Gb hard disk, 128MB Geforce Go 7300)

Answer 1

Yes, buy it. Laptops fail at a very high rate due to the heat problems.
Check if you can find a 3-yr warranty. It should be much cheaper. These days nobody keeps a computer for 4 years, especially a laptop.

By the way,4 years from now that laptop will not worth much (maybe $100), so the smash and collect trick will not pay much.

Answer 2

In most cases, the only person who gains through you buying an extended warranty is the person who sells it to you - but as you know, laptops are notorious for catastrophic failure just beyond the term of the manufacturer's warranty. It's happened to me twice, and the second time, believe me, the extended warranty saved my bacon and my savings account. I only wish I'd had the foresight to have purchased an extended warranty the first time around!