A few days ago, my seven-year-old “desktop” PC stopped working.
I’m pretty sure that it was just a power supply problem but given that the average lifespan for desktops is 5 to 8 years I decided that the money it would take to repair the old one would be better spent on a new machine.
I wanted something with a smaller footprint. Unfortunately, that had been the goal with the old device, too, but I didn’t do my homework and ended up with a much larger tower PC than I desired. It was so large that to keep from cluttering the top of my desk, I suspended it beneath.
The PC I decided on certainly has a smaller footprint—5 1/4″ long, 5″ wide, and 2″ high—but when one thinks of the computing power that goes into a small laptop like the Dell I am typing this on, that’s not all that amazing.
I’ve not set up the new PC yet. Unfortunately, after I ordered the machine, I started feeling sick, enough so that I don’t feel like getting into the nitty gritty of getting all of my stuff back up and running and enough so that I needed to do an in-home COVID test—fortunately negative.
I didn’t lose any data or files with the old machine dying. I spent about $30, including taxes, for a flat docking station that turned the 2-terabyte drive from the old machine into an external hard drive. (The docking station is actually dimensionally larger than the new PC.)