pigfarmer
tall, thin, irritable
Around a dozen years ago I purchase an HP desktop computer. When I fired it up I was getting horizontal bands of static across the screen. I immediately marched it back to the dealer. The techs scratched their heads until they figured out the problem. The power supply was too undersized for the computer. After a lot of back and forth they upped the power supply.
I didn’t keep that HP very long. I found a place locally that builds custom PCs. I have been buying from them ever since.
I like the old tower form factor. Like a B-52 you can just keep adding and subtracting stuff depending on whatever's in vogue at the time. HP, IBM and Dell were just fine with their commercial grade servers but the consumer products are marketed toward the neophyte and they load them with resource consuming garbage. There was a utility out there called 'PC decrapifier' that would winkle out all the Dell crapola they load it with; support, advertising, hawking printer cartridges, etc. Annoying. A clean OS load would be appreciated but that doesn't exist in the general consumer realm.
CC Cleaner and Revo Uninstall are handy little free utilities for seeing what's going on. I like AKG Backup for uh-oh backups although it's a bit dated. More of an incremental copy than a backup. Handy. I use it because I've had compressed backups fail. With this you can view the contents with any windows machine, you just have to think about where your store stuff a bit more carefully.