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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   980 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 15, 2026

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In defiance of the typical advice to avoid making any decisions for a year, my husband's desktop died while I was getting a backup of the data.

I have gotten the external raids mounted on another system to get them backed up. That leaves me with the internal drives. I don't see a raid card in the machine but I could be wrong. The symptoms of the machine are getting stuck in a boot loop. It dies/restarts at different points so I think it's the power supply. A drive enclosure is significantly cheaper than a replacement 825w power supply. It could be memory, but there's only one module so I can't do the easy test of swapping out memory/sockets to see if the problem goes away.

I don't exactly want to decide to let his system be dead. He was a gamer & also did tons of graphics processing and he babied this thing. But neither my daughter nor I have his use cases and resurrecting this just to shut it down after I get a backup seems pointless. If the internal drives are in a raid my decision is made for me. But if they're not...

This is why they say to not make major decisions for a year. Not just because it's too easy to decide something in the throes of madness, but also because your ability to think just flat out goes out the window.

So. Would you rebuild it? Play one last game of Half Life 2 since he'll never get to play 3 (like there will ever be 3) with his daughter? Or focus on the data and get backups of his photos and digital art and leave the hunk of metal dead like its owner?

I would think the data on it is more important than the machine itself. I have a decent gaming rig that I keep up to date. But if it crapped out and I was gone I wouldn't want my wife stressing about getting it working again. I'd possibly want it to go to a friend who might be able to get some use out of it after swapping out the hard drives.

I replied before reading all of the comments, so I'm glad to see others feel a similar way. If I was dead, the fact that my wife kept my data and memories, and tried to play a video game I would like with our child would have meant everything to me.

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