The past few months have been expensive for tech.

My desktop PC has been limping along with major issues for a while.  I thought I wanted the MS Surface Studio, with its large touch-sensitive screen, but it hasn’t had a spec upgrade in 4 years.  The cycle is that there should be a refresh of the components approximately every two years, but there was a little pandemic that upset everything.  However, finally, a new version came out.  Since it’s expensive, I’ll have to save up for it.

But then my home NAS reported warnings about the health of the drives.  A bit expensive but a NAS must be reliable otherwise why have it?  I purchased a pair of replacement drives … the old ones were WD Reds so I went with the same, just a larger capacity.  They’re now installed and everything is copied over.  But now I hear an allegation that WD Red drives can give a false positive for drive issues.  If true, did I replace them for nothing?

Then, I had a similar situation with my laptop (MS Surface Pro 6).  It doesn’t use an HDD like the NAS, but an SSD.  The thing about SSDs are they have a finite guaranteed number of ‘writes’.  My laptop’s SSD has reached that limit.  It won’t stop at that point, but it will stop at some point after, and with no warning.  And a downside with the MS Surface Pro 6 is the SSD isn’t replaceable.  (Or it is if you can unglue the screen and then unsolder the SSD from the motherboard.)  So I now have a new MS Surface Pro 9.  I really like the Surface Pro line and, ironically, in the 9, the SSD is easily accessible behind a panel held on by a magnet.  The downside is Surface Pros are expensive.

To add insult to injury, since I already had many of the programs in the Office 2016 suite, I had recently added Project 2016 and Visio 2016.  Even though that sounds like I have old versions, the reality is, once installed they upgrade to the latest for free.  To avoid getting illicit software, I’d purchased these from a site that purported to be an MS Partner (Microsoft themselves only sells the latest versions, which are more expensive).  These programs had installed fine initially, but when the time came to transfer them to the new laptop, the licence strings were now deemed invalid.  Even though they’re supposed to be transferable, the vendor refused to honour this, offering me a 20% discount on repurchase.

So, with all that going on, not only have I not saved anything towards that desktop PC I had my eye on, but it’s going to be months before I’ve paid off all these other items.  Plus, all this time spent working on my tech means less time writing.

<sigh!>