A lapse in reason

Have I lost my mind? It is something I have been asking myself over the last couple of weeks. However, that questioning did not stop the inevitable decision to build myself a new computer.

The old rig I have is eight years old and showing a few issues. It started life as a windows 7 build and a couple years ago, lost the usb drivers. I tried a lot of things, but the only way to get it working was to upgrade to windows 10. I did an in-place upgrade (to avoid having to reinstall all my software) and while it mostly fixed things, Microsoft immediately prompted me to do a full wipe/reinstall. Which resulted in me giving my computer screen a few hand gestures. (I bought the upgrade to avoid the reinstall.  They sold me the upgrade as not having to reinstall everything, and only after I pay and do it, they tell me I should wipe it! Total crap.)

Anyway, fast forward a couple years, and my old rig has been showing more and more problems with windows 10 that truly indicate I should wipe and reinstall. Oh, the pain of reinstalling all that software on a computer, some of which I can’t reinstall because the software is old and the company won’t allow me to activate without an upgrade. This is the pain and expense I have tried to avoid for so long.

What have I done now?

Well, with the house sold, and the vehicles paid for, and no other pressing expenses, I got it into my head that if I am going to have to wipe and reinstall everything, it would be a heck of a lot easier to just build a new machine and have both up and running for a while until I got everything working. So … as you can guess, that is what I have started doing.

The old machine is still quite viable (it was a powerful build) but doesn’t have all of the latest and greatest things that modern computers have. It has some usb 3 ports, but they were original usb 3.0, not the latest versions.  The video card was high-end, at the time, but now video editing software tells me it may not perform. The root drive was undersized. I had an early ssd drive, that I had replaced twice over going from 128gb, to 256gb, to eventually 512gb (there are utilities to just transfer contents without reinstalling anything). Now, 1tb drives are less than I paid for the 128gb one.

The new rig I am building out has all the modern goodies, but because I cannot keep the os as it is, I am now in the living hell of installing this and that and configuring this and that and why the F can’t windows just let me set up my interface the way I want without hacking things. The hardware assembly took only a couple hours, the software setup will take me a couple of weeks. Yes, it is definitely a first world problem, but it takes so much time to get it all set up; time I would rather spend doing other things. And that is why I avoided this for so long.

When it is all said and done, I will definitely enjoy the new computer. I just have to get to the point where I have 80% of the things I need back in place.