Anyone else have a mental image of the guy in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness who says “pray for death” as his body falls apart into a pile of ants?

That’s the one part that isn’t artificial though

Don’t know, and don’t care to find out. I only visited the backwoods, I certainly don’t live there

When I was a kid I visited my cousin in backwoods Missouri, and we heard on the radio that there was an uptick in leprosy because of people eating roadkill armadillo. It was a real wtf moment in my life

Interesting, and ty for the troubleshooting tips. I’ll definitely keep this in mind as something to monitor when transitioning over the os on my laptop

Yea, I’m not ruling out a string of bad luck just causing all of the really old hardware to fail at the same time. As for your idea of unstable electricity, both PCs were plugged into a surge protector (not simultaneously), and the laptop was plugged into a completely separate surge protector in a different room. Doesn’t seem likely, but at the same time I’m not particularly knowledgeable on that front

I guess I could be jumping to conclusions with the laptop, but I did a test with the PCs and I’m pretty sure it’s the PSU. Both PCs are identical because my friend and I used the same list of parts to build them over a decade ago. Mine died a little bit after installing Mint, and since my friend has a more recent build, he let me salvage his PC for parts. First thing I did was see what happens if I just put his PSU in my dead PC and it immediately booted back up. However, I was concerned that maybe some other bit of hardware in my PC caused the PSU to fail, so I just put my hard drive and the working PSU back into my friend’s PC and used it as normal. About a month after that, it died the same way.

As for the other things you’ve suggested, I did try all of those tests to no avail, as well as cleaning/dusting all of the internals and connection ports with compressed air. I got nothing, which is why I figured I’d ask here.

I’m kinda split on this. On the one hand, I like the idea, but on the other, I don’t feel like my skills are up to snuff for this kind of project

Yea, I know someone who did the same, and we really haven’t talked since. It sucks that people will put aside their ethics for cash, but it’s not everyone. These people are the ones who get the most headlines

Might not seem like it in recent years, but there are still tech workers with standards and morals

A younger version of me would ask for a referral, but now I know better about MS and have standards (from the unemployment line)

Shit, I’m sorry to hear that. Sounds like we’re all in the same boat…

Man, I’m not good at anything except making an occasionally funny snarky comment

It’s probably worth it to look into changing fields entirely, but honestly so many industries in the US are hurting right now, IDK which ones would even be a good option…