No, I didn't get shot over Easter weekend. But I figuratively bit the bullet and bought a new computer.
Why? Well, a month or so ago, I averted a crisis (that manifested itself as 3 separate issues, all at once):
- Power supply died.
- Hard drive was making lots of thrashing noises.
- USB peripherals would suddenly and haphazardly either stop working or just work really janky.
Of course, the power supply was the one thing that made me take reactive action (I hate that). This happened late Friday afternoon. I think it was even a holiday weekend, if I'm not mistaken.
Got a new power supply and SSD boot drive. But those mysterious USB issues were still looming. I've dealt with this stuff long enough to know the
motherboard was slowly failing.
Within the week, that cranky hard drive was really screeching. And then it died.
And things
just. s t a r t e d . s l o w i n g d o w n . . .
I haven't bought a new PC for quite a few years. In the past, I always built my own. Then a few years ago I got lazy and had a
local PC shop build a couple of mine.
This time, I bought a Dell. I know what you're thinking.
But it was a really good deal at
Costco. Intel i7 6th gen, 16Gigs of RAM, a 4GB video card, 2TB 7200rpm SATA hard drive.
Not bad specs. And I had just had that 250Gb SSD installed in my "old" PC, so I re-purposed it and now it's my "boot drive."
Nowadays, I store all my data on an external drive that syncs to Google Drive, so that all my devices can access any file any time PLUS all my critical files are stored in at least two places (that external drive and Google).
Plus, I use BackBlaze which backs up everything on my PC. In the cloud of course.
That is really for peace of mind. If I "lose" a file, I can always go get it there.