Our new home! :Let's start arguing.

Backup strategies and HDD reliability always get a few people going.

Which is why you never need to back them up!

Time to start some AI discussions?
Speaking of reliability, in my limited experience, many issues may arise from upgrading parts of your system. Be a new router, an additional drive, a new screen.
These are more germane when new drivers are required.
Your thoughts?

From my equally limited experience adding anything new tends to create exciting new opportunities for incompatibility issues. However, I think the issues are less serious now than, say, 10 years ago. More interfaces (both hardware and software) are standardised, vendors know how to use those interfaces, and most products "just work" when you connect them. I find most problems with things that are new (or newer). For example, M.2 drives were a problem for a year or two, until standard Windows drivers understood them properly.

Other problems I find are with less used (and less understood) things like colour management, where software vendors still manage to screw up. With the exception of software specifically written for photographers, graphic designers or publishers, most software developers know nothing and care less about colour management.

Meh, hardware compatibility is not that much of an issue any more. I've regularly upgraded drives and RAM for systems at work. Graphics card manufacturers are pretty good with providing compatibility info.

During the pandemic I took an engineering workstation (the only one we could find available), changed to m.2 ssds, went from 32 to 128 gb ram, swapped out the mid line gtx graphics card for a Quadro (required for engineering cad) and ended up with the workstation I wanted to buy but could not buy.

Even virtual environments can be very simple to set up, as long as you don't want to do fancy stuff like load balancing and failover.

Networking stuff can be whole heaps more complicated. That's why Cisco certified engineers can pretty much write their own ticket.

I agree. These days it's almost to the point where if the plug fits then it'll work. Boy have we ever come a long way from the days of having to set DIP switches...

Yes, things are much easier now; after assembling the components for a new PC and installing the OS, everything important worked right away with no tweaking on my part. I installed a few extra drivers to clean up Device Manager, but even that wasn't strictly necessary. No more manual IRQ settings, etc., yay!

I upgraded my Surface 4 Pro to Win 10 some time back, and then after the latest update, it went really nuts. The screen kept jumping about, the mouse pointer disappeared and returned, all quite randomly.

Eventually, today afternoon, it is back to normal! Seems when I installed Win 10 it used the recommended settings for everything (including display resolution, and that just cost it too much power to be stable (seemed very hot as well). So I roughly halved the resolution and now it works just fine.

Microsoft's recommendations about how to get a Surface 4 working were either on the level of a programmer, or just plain stupid, like you should upgrade, which I just had done!!! Or turn it on-off, either just do that or hold down the power button for 30 sec and then the audio-down button. That had absolutely no effect at all!

So I will use it on travel (if it gets lost, so what) but never at home, as my older iMac is so much better! But it was a gift and now it works, will probably do so even in a hot climate!

All the best!

If this is heat-related, perhaps dust has accumulated inside? I'd try blowing out any ventilation slots with 'canned air' to see if I could restore full resolution.