Short term investment

This equipment came standard with my new house. I have very limited requirement for my microwave, so I didn't really look into it that much.

It did it's job fine for about 18 month. It was powerful, the basic function where handy. I usually got the job done with on touch. It is supposed to have a wide variety of fancy cooking mode, but 98% of the time I used it at full power, for 30 second to 4 minutes...

After 18 month of operation and less than 40 hours of running time it suddenly started to bip loudly and displayed -F3- on the screen. After trying the obvious to make this nasty message go away (unplug for while and re-plug) I look-up on the internet and found that I was not alone. Many unfortunate GE customers have experienced the same thing, all the reports I've seen mentioned 1 1/2 to 2 years before failure. Most of them have wasted $70 to know that -F3- mean that the control-panel is fried and needs to be replaced. 20% of the price of the apparel to learn that you will have to spend much more to fix it! I don't think so.
I pulled back my old counter-top sharp microwave from the attic. It had worked for more than 3 years, and been store for almost 2... Still work like a charm.
My advice: Stay away from GE microwave