(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Advice needed from computer savvy users [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-03-21 PCs and I have become estranged over the years My current PC has been having issues for a while now. It’s long past time to replace it, but I’m even more outdated than it is, so I’m looking for advice on several things. In the mid- to late 90’s I built a few PCs from components for myself, and a couple hundred for Bexar County (assemble components into an empty tower, format the drive, install Windows 95, copy the user’s existing drive up to the network, swap out the desktop, copy the user’s files back to the PC.) When I was building my own, I liked to partition the drive into C: (operating system), D: (applications) and E: (data); backups of C: would be done infrequently, of D: any time a new application was installed or an existing one significantly ungraded, and of E: weekly. At the time I was doing this, such partitioning had to be done in between formatting and installing anything – partitioning on the fly was only just becoming a possibility when I quit building my own. TRIGGER WARNING: Responsible computer users may experience feelings of shock, horror or dismay at reading what follows. If you have anxiety issues, a heart condition, or are or may be pregnant, do not read further without consulting a doctor. The Hardware What I have currently is a desktop/tower PC built by Discount Electronics in Austin (I’m in San Antonio) around an Intel Core i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40 GHz with 8GB RAM. The HDD was damaged some time back. For a number of reasons, none of them good, I haven’t done anything about it: It doesn’t affect anything we do, unless we have to reboot, and then it just gives us a warning, a recommendation to Check Disk, and the option to skip doing so; I’m lazy, and I tend to put things off until they become too big to ignore; My wife and I are on it constantly, and experience significant withdrawal symptoms if it’s away at a computer repair shop for a couple of days. Basically, one or more sectors of the drive have been corrupted. With one or two possible exceptions, there’s (almost) no visible impact on anything we do – the applications all seem to work normally, the data we’ve looked at all seems to be intact, we haven’t noticed anything missing. We do tend to have a lot of things running at once, and we also tend to leave the PC running for weeks or months at a time without shutting down, so: temporary file buildup. For whatever reason, once in a while the system sort of locks up, going into an apparently endless wait state, and we have to reboot. When that happens, we get the warning about the damaged HDD, skip the Disk Check, let it reboot into Windows, and two things are noticeably different: The screen resolution has changed. Everything’s too big/close, and we’re unable to change it. However, this eventually takes care of itself and our preferred screen resolution returns on its own. My desktop icons are pulled from where I put them back into a square grid on the left-hand side of the screen. This doesn’t reset itself. I have to redo it manually each time. So maybe the code that remembers desktop icon placement is in the corrupted sector. The Operating System This PC is running 64-bit Windows Professional 7 (Service Pack 1.) Yes, Windows 7. The last PC I built for myself in ran for many years on Windows 95B, which was no longer supported after December 31, 2000. At some point after 2001 I moved to Windows XP. Well after 2009 I skipped Vista and upgraded to Windows 7. That may have been as recently as four years ago. Not sure. Windows 7 ended support on January 10 of this year. Windows 10 was (I think) last updated in November 2021, and is scheduled to reach the end of support on October 14, 2025. My office uses Windows 10, so I’m fine moving to that, but again: end of support in two years. Windows 11 was released on October 4, 2021 but I’ve still never seen it. No idea what I’d be getting into there. The Applications Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2016 (I’m fine upgrading to Office 360) Word Perfect X7 (my wife hates MS Word and will never give up Word Perfect) Firefox (still have Chrome for a couple of things) Avast Free Anti-Virus Backups: None Lots of little stuff we probably no longer have the installation files for. The Data Yes, you read the above bullet correctly: no backups. For a while we were using Norton Ghost, which was discontinued in 2013. Before that it was…I can’t remember…something I wasn’t happy with, because it compressed data as the only option. I mean, saving space it nice, but the external HDD we were using for backup was a lot larger than the one in the PC, so it wasn’t necessary. And I liked having the option of seeing a file on the backup drive and copying individual files back to the PC, rather than having to decompress everything. The only backup we have now is the one done by Discount Electronics in 2019 when they built this PC. The Network We don’t have one. In theory, Spectrum (which bundles our internet, phone and cable services) provides us with wi-fi, but I’ve never been given a password, and our network connections icon only shows that we are connected to “Network 4 (internet access)” – no wi-fi connections are detected. We might need to buy a mobile hotspot, or maybe the next PC we get will have wi-fi on board. It would be nice to have this PC networked to the one other one we have. How we use this PC We don’t do anything requiring high-end graphics or super high processors, like video gaming. (We have a second desktop PC that my wife plays SIMS on, but it doesn’t even have internet connection. She keeps up with SIMS users and user groups on our main PC, downloads patches onto a flash drive, and takes them across the hall to install them on the gaming PC.) But internet, email, it’s all done here. I don’t have a smart phone that could do any of those chores. I have been working from my home since mid-2020, so I do have my work laptop as a backup, and I do use it in blatant violation of the County’s “to be used only for work purposes” policy. Advice needed So, here’s what I’m looking for in the way of advice for a replacement. Keep in mind I will likely be going to Discount Electronics again as my first stop, where options may be limited but savings can be up to 80% off MSRP: Desktop vs. laptop w/dock vs. all-in-one: pros and cons? Processor and RAM: An all-in-one I looked at offered an Intel Quad Core i5-6500 @ 3.2GHz, which benchmark suggested is less powerful than what I currently have. But for some things – and I don’t know which – RAM is at least as important as CPU and a lot of software really only uses a single thread so the 4-thread advantage of my CPU may not be as important as it looks on a benchmark. OS: Windows 10 or Windows 11: pros & cons, things to watch out for in Windows 11? Applications & Data: If I go with Discount Electronics again, they’re in another city, so they won’t have my current HDD to work with. I’ll have to take both boxes to a local computer shop to copy it all over. Do I tell the computer shop to copy my drive (excluding the OS?) Image my drive? What kind of things might not be copied? By not doing fresh installs of all the applications, do I risk copying damaged files from the corrupted drive sectors? Network: What am I likely to need, or need to ask for in the build, in order to create an in-home network for my two PCs? Partitions: If I decide to go back to using multiple drive partitions, what’s a good app for doing this after the OS and applications are installed? Anyone using Partition Magic or Paragon Partition Manager? Backups: I prefer external HDD to Cloud; the option to copy data without compressing it; and (if I go with multiple partitions) the ability to schedule multiple different backups. What’s a good app to do this? Anyone using Paragon Backup & Recovery? 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