As usual, I find myself behind in the conversation. Yes, I actually went through 30 pages or so to catch up, instead of asking Cubdriver for a synopsis
Anyway, in the meantime I ordered a SSD from a shop 500m away from my office to be delivered home 50km away and instead it shipped from near a dwagon lair 500km away. It felt like it took forever, but now my Windows7 desktop works again. It actually was forever, since bd139 was able to order a SSD, send it back, order the correct SDD and receive it in less time than the shop took to send mine out... and then delivery took a long time after that
With a working computer again, I topped up my Digikey shopping list with an ESD mat to get free shipping and was surprised at the price. I took a second look and found a nice ESD mat on ebay based on this recommendation:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/so-what_s-a-decent-but-cheap-esd-workbench-mat/msg1354206/#msg1354206. So now I have what I want; the mat also shipped from near the dwagon lair, but this time only took 5 days from order to delivery.
However, what I need is stuck in a Digikey shoppping list for $2, only $98 short of free shipping.
At least the money saved can go to TEA, right? WRONG. SWMBO reminded me that the garcon is almost old enough to be allowed to play Minecraft; we have been telling him for almost two years that he needed to wait until he was old enough. I took a look and it turns out our home office computer (the one mentioned above that needed the SSD replacement) is the only machine we have that is capable of running that game. So, it is time for a new home desktop, which is not as good as TEA, but will be a nice upgrade. Not only that, but I have not assembled a computer in over 15 years now.
The recent recommendations on computer components in this thread might be wee bit expensive since the budget will be approximately $1000CAD; of course I will do my best to let it go a bit over budget (shhhh).
With computers being a common topic, I did try to pull my old laptop off the dust pile and fire it up. I thought it only sat there on the pile a few months. Must have been longer since it was next to useless. It has an Intel N270 running Windows XP
Time to experiment; I am thinking of trying xubuntu 18 but open to recommendations of suitable OS for a small boat anchor.