So, I’ve been writing a 175k word One Piece fanfic for about 6 months. Most of my writing is done on a 10 year-old laptop I dug out of the closet while I wait for my kid to finish sports practice. Today, the hard-drive died. (Thankfully I have a cloud backup.)
Now, without a laptop, I have nothing to continue working on. I can’t afford a new laptop. Just glad I didn’t lose all my work.
When i couldn’t afford a new computer, i went out and got one of those raspberry pis. you need to have and external mouse, keyboard and monitor, but the “computer” itself is relatively cheap. I think you can get a one for something like 50 bucks. You have to load it with a lightweight os like ubuntu mate, or something with lxde as its desktop environment.
that, or you could go the more pretentious route and get a typewriter.