New “Desktop” PC

Note: This is cross-posted from my new blog, Mike’s Place, where I plan to focus most of my future blogging activities.  I will continue to cross-post on the appropriate old location for several months.

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.)