I had a 2018 model XPS PC up until 2025, when I think excessive current draw through my UPS caused it to cut out unexpectedly. Using the power self-test button on the back of the computer, plugging and unplugging different components, I narrowed down that the part of the PC which was malfunctioning… was the Motherboard, the part that is the least easily swappable. I’d been hoping it was just the PSU! That would have been so much cheaper.
I ended up getting a Lenovo Legion T5, with a GTX 4070 Super graphics card and an i7 processor and 32GB of DDR5 RAM. It doesn’t seem like any of my old drives got fried, and my NAS takes daily backups, so even if there was a problem it’s something I could have worked with. Restoring and migrating all my old programs took a few days, and even a week after replacing it I’m still realising things I’ve forgotten to restore on a quite regular basis. But it doesn’t seem like anything major has been lost.
The main loss was that my computer is such a fundamental part of my thinking process. It serves me as a cognitive prosthetic, with systems I’ve designed to compensate for my own idiosyncracies. My PC checks if I’ve checked off my pills in TickTick, and bugs me if I haven’t taken them of my own accord by 9am. The day after my PC died, I forgot to take my pills until around midday. This isn’t great!
My systems are quite brittle. I need to work on making them more failure-resistant and resilient to these kind of events. There’s the obvious stuff - getting a bulkier UPS, where the power draw from my PC is unlikely to trigger it, maybe some kind of USB port isolation in case that was voltage mismatch from peripherals that weren’t going via the UPS. Fixing the symptoms, and reducing the odds of the failure happening again. But the deeper problem is that I’m so thoroughly integrated with This Specific Machine.
As I think more, there’s a trap I’ve been implicitly endorsing, every time I recommend the use of external systems to modulate cognition. And the risk is that those systems can break. I already knew this could happen! When Wunderlist shut down for Microsoft To-Do (which had a very different featureset and focus), the time between that and migrating to TickTick was a period of time where I could feel my brain not working. Because these external tools are critical to manage my attention, prioritise and direct resources, and even to remind myself to take breaks and seek recreational activities or interesting events.
So there’s a tradeoff. If you entrench in a particular methodology, you can yield higher dividends, but you’re less robust to unpredictable change. Whereas if you use a range of methodologies, each of which has its own backups and fallbacks to other methods, then if one component breaks you’re likely able to recover from the other parts.