First of all, yes, everyone using older technology “has bullets coming at them”, you clearly know as well as I do about wear and tear in electronic components so I don’t know why the tone of your reply implies that older hardware will run fine forever as long as “nothing is wrong”. It’s a balancing act; you can’t know if something’s gonna go wrong with your hardware until it does, but failure rates go up the older it gets, plain and simple.

Secondly, yes, you completely misunderstood what I said. I upgraded before anything went wrong, for gaming and local AI primarily, and because I wanted to avoid the tariffs I knew were coming. I repurposed my old system in its entirety into a server, and not even a few months later it BSOD’d with the fatal hardware error. I know it can be a transient error, I said it’s generally not, because that’s my experience in the absence of overheating/overvolting. I had not overclocked at all, I don’t feel like risking it for a few extra percent performance when I’m running a system for long-term stability.

Finally, I think you’ll find that I not only didn’t recommend an upgrade and just parted out an upgrade kit at what most would consider a reasonable price these days, but that I ALSO labeled my experience as an anecdote. Meanwhile, you gave your anecdote like it shows I’m an asshole or an idiot, or both, for upgrading when my PC wasn’t on literal fire. Fuck me for trying to help a buddy out on the Internet, I guess.