We got back home to Vancouver. Turn on the main desktop computer and all is working fine. A lot of updates were needed so had it start with that and left it be. Not long after saw the unhappy emoji blue screen of death and wondered how that could have happened. Fine, reboot.
And the computer is stuck in an infinite reboot cycle. I did some googling and looking into the bios, but eventually, the boot SSD drive decides to give up the ghost completely. Which I find extremely annoying. I bought an Intel 540s series hoping it would last longer than most SSDs. Although I can’t remember when I bought this thing so maybe it did last longer than most.
At any rate, I had to dig around for a new boot drive. I have a few old 1 TB drives from my NAS that were lightly used as I upgraded the NAS to 4 TB drives. So back to spinning disks for the boot drive. The computer is noticeably not as spunky on startup but that is to be expected. Going through the installs again. Thankfully most software is downloaded nowadays. I do not have much that needs to be installed via CD/DVD any more. So the reinstallation, still taking some time feels like it is going a lot faster. Still a colossal waste of time. From now on I am going to be a bit more diligent in keeping an up-to-date backup of the boot drive.
And most of the critical stuff is living on a spinning disk second drive. Boot disk was just for that, booting; and all the installed software. Why Microsoft will not allow certain items to be placed on a different drive easily is beyond me. Or why so many writes need to happen to the boot drive at all. Save the SSD Microsoft! Ugh. SSD drive manufacturers are not complaining though.
But it might be time to update the motherboard and CPU. Which apparently is not up to snuff with regards to Windows 11. I have a 6th Gen Core i7 running at 3.something GHz. Plenty fast for pretty much anything still. Most games are still running pretty fine on this old CPU. But nope. Windows 11 minimum is a 7th Gen Core i7. Sigh. Plus my motherboard does not have that security chip installed so that is another mark against it. Everything else is up to par. But this update will not happen any time soon. My wife still has another half year or more in the States so the desktop will not be used at all until we get back home again then. Plenty of time to do some research on new motherboards, CPUs, Ram, and new boot drive(s). The video card was recently updated to an nVidia 2080 so that should be ok for now. I hope. Sheesh.