After many years without a desktop computer, I decided to build one in late 2018 to use as my main computer. My Surface Pro 3 was ageing fast and couldn’t keep up with my increasing demands. After a price comparison frenzy, I ended up with a solid computer. After around seven months of keeping a close eye on the computer, there we two aspects of it that annoyed me. I wasn’t very happy with the Spire cooler that came bundled with the Ryzen 5 2600X. The noise level was annoying, no matter what fan profile I tried to configure in the motherboard UEFI. Also, I faced too many occasions where I exhausted the 16 GB of RAM I had at the time while working.
I decided to go for a little upgrade in mid-2019, influenced by the decrease in price of RAM. I got a Noctua NH-D15 for the CPU and a kit of Corsair LPX Vengeance 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) 3000 MHz C15. I ended up with a total of 48 GB of RAM (2 x 8 GB and 2 x 16 GB) and a zebra colour scheme. It brings a je ne sais quoi to the design (no, it doesn’t). The cooler had an immediate impact on the system with a 10C decrease to the average CPU temperature. As for the RAM, Vivaldi and Firefox have tried (and failed) to conquer it.
Late last year, I started contemplating my flawed approach to data management. The first step to start organizing all the information I have in my hard drives was to buy more drives, of course. If you have a problem, you throw money and hardware at it. Right, you throw money at retailers to buy hardware that you’ll then throw at the problem. In early 2020, I took the jump and pulled the trigger on a 12 TB Seagate Ironwolf drive. That allowed me to copy all the data I have to it and start the cleansing. I was also able to cancel the cloud storage subscription I was using (Microsoft OneDrive). The data organization part is still ongoing and I’ll need two more hard drives to wrap up everything. Alas, times are tough, so tight budgeting rules are in place.