New Computer Day

I purchased myself a new desktop computer as an early 44th birthday present. The previous one lasted a whopping seven years, which is a record for my computers. However, in the last 12 months, it had been plagued with power issues that would prevent it from turning back on after power outages unless I physically moved it and plugged it into a different outlet first.

Here are the machine specs, since I always forget these several years into ownership and have to dig all over to rediscover them:

• Dell XPS 9860
• i7-13700 CPU (16-Core, 24MB Cache, 2.1 - 5.1 GHz)
• 16GB DD5 (2x8GB) at 4800MHz
• 512 GB SSD (plus a 512 GB SSD for games and a 1 TB SSD for backups transferred from the old computer)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB
• A license for Office 2021 (finally retiring my multi-license for Office 2010)
• 750W Power Supply

The innards of the PC feature the cleanest cable management I've ever seen. My last PC was so full of giant, thick power wires that they exploded outward like a stomach-incubating alien every time I took the cover off.

Getting rid of bloatware like McAfee and disabling all of the Windows 11 telemetry was my first step, and it went surprisingly easily. Windows 11 continues the extended tradition of being a worse version of Windows 7 that hides settings in weird places and tries to convince you that you should be using a Microsoft Surface as your PC. For example, you can no longer create a grid of shortcuts in your Start Menu (it's just a single line flow that wraps at the edge), and the bottom 33% is reserved for ads even after you turn the ads off. The right-click context menu hides important commands like Delete and Rename under a "Show More Options" keystroke (this can only be reverted with a Registry Edit). They've also taken the titles off open apps on the taskbar so it's just a sea of icons -- this is awful for productivity but apparently this setting (which was around in Windows 10) is being restored soon.

For the first time ever, I did not reinstall Finale or Adobe Audition but maybe I'll get back to all of that music business some day far in the future.

And games? I can get a rock-solid 120 FPS at 144MHz in Diablo 4 with all settings maxed. There's a brief moment in the beginning where the fans whirl like an incoming tsunami, but the card handles the rest of the play session in a cool and collected manner.