stopped short

A couple of years ago I caught the HDD being a bit indecisive and decided to clone it onto an SSD, gaining a little speed in the process although it took a wee while to find all the copying errors. A couple of months ago the bottom half of my taskbar started being obscured by blank lines, but except for mornings and evenings at the kitchen table I mostly use external monitors. This morning the monitor driven from the VGA socket (as the HDMI socket gave up years ago) went blank for no visible good reason, but I managed to finish off what I was doing on the larger monitor (driven by an adaptor from the single USB 3.0 socket) before the whole thing shut down with a sigh, never to respond again to any inputs apart from occasionally fitfully whirring after pressing the power button, but not even getting as far as POSTing. All my data (particularly photos) are currently particularly well backed-up, but it's the reacquisition and reinstallation of software which is always the big pain. The fact that I haven't been able to do any audio-meddling for years and have to wait whilst even a simple photo saves down even after the upgrade to an unspinning drive meant that I was already speculatively inspecting the specifications of potential new laptops, but as Nicky's non-work laptop gave up a couple of months ago I'll have to wait a couple more months before getting what I would have got, so I'll have to find something cheap to make do for the next wee while and try not to take too many photos with the big camera until I have my slightly faffy but non-subscription-infested photo processing workflow back up and running.