End of Year PC Build

Strange. AOC -or Admiral Overseas Corporation wiki shows nothing about freezers and such. AOC have been in the TV business since the 1940's and 1950's. You sure your not thinking of the Admiral Craft Corporation -they made kitchen equipment?
Does this symbol look familiar:
The Vollrath Company bought ACC in 1974 -so if your Dad job changed after that its most likely that company and not AOC. If not then its indeed weird but maybe in the end IF it is the same company we will get to watch a movie and keep ice cream cold all in one unit. 

LG -while it may be an amalgamation of smaller companies its nothing new. If their supposeded tag line of "Life's Good" is to hold apparent then why is it I am seeing more issues with them? Quality control problem? Skimping on designs to save money? I still see LG as slipping. Don't know if the former CEO's adopted son -who is now the boss can get it going in the right direction -he has been in charge since 2018 -since the death of former CEO -his father. Which ironically is when I began to see the slipping from the international stage. I may be wrong its just the commonality that I see. 

Westinghouse however along with a fourth in Phillips Magnavox -just now Phillips have better quality than above -especially for price to performance. Not to mention durability -as previously stated the Westinghouse kept working even when damaged but the Phillips VCR/DVD combo I have will still work -even with the cover removed -don't advise doing unless you know what your doing and only if you truly want to save a VHS tape of mighty importance but still works even after getting the tape out.
 
So maybe Westinghouse and Phillips are for the technically inclined but they are in my opinion even better than Sony -which while they make great stuff doesn't last you no length of time maybe 3-5 years if that. These others should net you a decade easily -barring damage or a lemon. For instance the Westinghouse was nearly a 5- 7 years old when damaged and the Phillips is from 2007 and still functional. So I would actually place these above even RCA and the Ilk.
 
Speaking of RCA while its better than others out there and I would really consider them subpar these days. Now days they are more a connection point on devices than devices themselves. Granted that is from a time when they ruled the industry. It may be a regional thing -I don't know but both those companies have better quality than Sceptre or Acousitc Audio.

"So maybe Westinghouse and Phillips are for the technically inclined but they are in my opinion even better than Sony -which while they make great stuff doesn't last you no length of time maybe 3-5 years if that."

Atemporal Vanguardian-Debugger

I am a big Sony fan, my Sony TV's have always given me great longevity and my current 10+ year old Sony 1080p Bravia has better quality picture than the cheap ass 4K LG TV I won in a competition. This I do not understand TBH.

To the point I won't buy any other TV's after the 25+ years of great TV's from them. Maybe I got lucky.

Ok. I was skeptical that fridge would be manufactured in the same assembly line as a monitor. But the same person is the boss of both in its founding. We should request a cup cooler be included on the next monitor line. 

Ah Yes. 4K looks good.

As I said if you want Sony TV's your going to be going OLED or Mini LED -not now but soon enough. They are fazing out support of the older lines. Which can clearly be seen with the shoddy firmware updates that their older TV's are getting. Sure they support older stuff but don't even take the time to make an adequate patch till months later -if that.

The firmware issues were also on that line of TV's you mentioned so lucky you if you didn't use the bugged mess or got it after it was fixed. I have seen people who have had it fail in under 3-5 years -like most anything CURRENT Sony -their older stuff is fine to me.

Still matches what I said. 
Its too soon to say yet if its not in the 3 to 5 window. 
Just be cautious. 

Guys, I need some advice again. So my computer is at the shop right now. Got assembled fine. Problem is the new board doesn't recognize the OS drive anymore. He tried everything, nothing worked. Board might only work with win 11, I didn't check for that tbh. I think it's weird but it is what it is. So it will have to be nuked for the windows 11 upgrade. Kinda expected this anyway and hopefully made backups of everything I need to get my modded games running again, like cloning the whole AppsData folder. (Sidenote: I seem to have lost my Win 10 product key, it's not in the CD sleeve anymore, so that's 50 bucks extra for a new key. *sigh*)

I initially wanted the OS on the same old SATA instead of the M.2 because I couldn't care less if it boots in 10 or 2 seconds. Computer guy says it would be so much better to install the OS on the M.2. He claims a slower OS drive would have a negative effect on my games, really?? I thought the only thing that matters for games is how fast the install drive is?? I would like to have my games drive and my OS drive separate in case I need to do a fresh install again at some point. And modding guides always want everything NOT on C:. So is that outdated?

Should I just install OS and any future games on the M.2? Should I partition the M.2 in to 500GB for the OS and 1500 separate for games so that future fresh installs won't delete all my game stuff? Is that the best option? Sounds like it to me.

What would you do?

I also wonder about how much longer my old SSDs and HDDs will last. I'm not sure if the SATA with the OS is 8 years old too or it's the one I got a couple years later when win 10 was reinstalled. So 6 years old at the very least. Might be smart to go with the brand new M.2 because of that alone, right? I can keep using that 500GB SATA for one time game installs. If it fails soon no big loss.

I have to tell the guy how I want it done in about 11h. Would appreciate your input, if you happen to read this in time. Many thanks!

Sorry for wall of text but when I get a lot of information I try to give as much information as I can and hope it helps:

What you want isn't so much outdated as not conforming to Microsoft's -"Let us be Borg approach". So I see nothing wrong with it. Also anyone who works somewhere is going to try and sell you items you may not want or need and if you want different sometimes you have to do it yourself. 

You could try the Ameliorated Windows 10 version that Bmwcrazy mentioned in the past -it will not work for me but maybe it would be for you. Though I think there is talk its got spyware within so maybe not a good idea. You could look into Windows 10 Black Edition but I also think that its spyware laden. Though if your technically inclined you can probably remove most of the spyware. Personally I burned an ISO of Windows 10 Enterprise 1909 long time back and install Windows 10 -while internet is disabled in the BIOS. That way Windows can't find no internet period. 

The only thing a M.2 hard drive will help with is maybe bootiness as an OS drive and will help in snappiness in menus and the saving and load times if its the game drive. All of this pandering that "You must have M.2" is bollocks at the best of it. Any traditional hard drive will work as an OS or game drive. If you see a traditional drive cheaper than a M.2 I don't see why it won't work. Will it load as fast as M.2 -no. BUT it will work if time isn't a bother -just will take longer.

M.2 will not actually make the games run faster. If your Commander Shepard who is standing there in the ME2 Arrival DLC waiting for the timer to run out the M.2 isn't going to speed that up. Speaking as some who has multiple drives -4+ and more in the new build. I would advise keeping the games and OS separate. Also most mod programs now ask where you want your mod items to go -even the Fallout 76 one does.

When you partition a SSD -while it does not cause degradation in performance -if you have to reinstall the OS multiple times then that section will become unusable first. So after a time that space will not function and you will have to use space for games as the OS partition. Also if you put games on the same drive with the OS then that will fill up the SSD faster and one thing about SSD's -they like free space -the fuller they get the slower they eventually run.

In my view if using a SSD and want it to have a LONG and productive life -you should keep free space above 40%+ free space. So in my opinion its best to keep it two drives -one for OS and one for games. If your game collection is massive though you may want to consider three drives. One for OS. Then two drives for games: half and half. That would keep the drives free space high and keep the SSD performance up longer than most who just fill up hard drives. It may be more expensive but it pays off in the long run.  

If you want to know how long a Hard Drive will last you can check using Crystal Disk Info but I don't really use it since it just goes off the S.M.A.R.T. data. I prefer using Hard Drive Sentinel -it even shows estimated Drive life left. Had a friend who used HDS and it reported 6GB of damaged sectors and a suspected drive life time left of about a week. He didn't believe and took it to Microcenter and they basically verified what HDS had told him. They also tried to sell him a whole new computer when all he wanted was to replace the drive but they didn't expect is his fortitude. Saved himself $1200 getting the drive replaced versus getting a completely new PC -with speed he didn't need: only does email and minecraft. 

Hope it helps. 

Decided to go with partitioning after all. I will just have to rely on the M.2 lasting a long time again. I haven't had a single hardware failure in those 8 years. Fingers crossed. If it fails both drives are toast. But I'll do these tests with the software recommended above frequently if I don't forget to determine how close it is too its expiration date.

Ideally I should probably have bought an additional M.2 500GB for the OS (they're super cheap after all now) but I want the computer back today so I can work on getting my games running again on the weekend.

Morning, Kappa.  I use M.2s and SSDs.....I use my SSD for backups and everything else I put on the M.2.   Now, I do have two or three M.2s (which are far superior to even SSDs in my opinion for several reasons), and one is named "Game Drive", however, that one presently sits empty.   I habitually install everything on just one drive (OS, Games, Other Programs etc etc), and generally if you have at least 1 TB of space you should be okay to do that.   However, it is wise to separate things such as Games, Other Programs etc and even your OS....for instances like this where you need to re-install Windows.

In my case, I often lose everything and have to re-install it all if there is any problems.  If you separate it, you won't lose much if anything at all.

Also, if some of your parts are at least 5 years old and you are questioning the compatability and connectivity....I would buy new parts to make sure that those factors aren't an issue.  And yes, you can always reuse the older parts for things like Storage...They just won't be optimally useful since they don't have an OS installed on them.

Cascading failures usually start happening around year 5 to 7 so Kappa is extremely lucky or knows how to take care of their equipment. 

Yeah, so basically, make sure you have offline backups ready I would, actually, use HDD's for those.

OK my PC is back and it's a collosal clusterfuck on so many levels. Some my fault, others a total mystery.

Let's start with the biggest hilarious I want to cry irony ever: apparently my SATA with the old OS on was partitioned too and my games drive was the other drive with all my modded games on it and I have no recollection of it. Because when I got my PC back and inspected my drives my games drive was gone... All I have now is aside from my two HDD drives is an empty formatted 500GB SATA....

So I completely fucked myself over not remembering any of it. I told him to format the SSD because I assumed only the OS was on that one. Even now that I know what must have happened I still don't remember this. Omfg. While I do have a backup of the FO4 and Skyrim SE game folders I did not have enough space to backup all the stuff from the mod manager that I actually need for Skyrim. FO4 might be fine because I don't use a mod manager for it anymore. If I can just salvage my modded Fallout, I'll be emotionally fine. It's my forever game I've been modding for 6 years. Skyrim is not finished modding. I put it on hold last year. So that's likely a dozen of hours for nothing. Will have to reinstall all these mods. Sigh.

So now the actual scary stuff that isn't completely my own stupid fault:
Anything I try to download and install crashes my computer because of missing dll. First thing I tried to do was install Firefox. Told me I was missing a dll and then my computer shut down. It rebooted, I tried downloading it again thinking maybe the download got corrupted, same error but this time it installed SOMETHING and when I tried to click on the icon I got another blue screen telling me the PC can't even find the boot drive anymore!!! I freaked out, stared at the screen for a few minutes trying to Google what just happened. In the meantime the PC rebooted by itself anyway and was fine again. I was SO relieved. But WTF is going on? This can't be a good sign. Haven't touched Firefox since. Figured it might be some weird Win 11 issue, already hating the upgrade after five minutes. Splendid.

Then I tried to install Steam and I got another missing dll error messages this time from Steam. The steamui.dll. A known issue at least. But none I ever had before. This too crashed my computer!!!
It rebooted and then suddenly I got to the login screen. And then it crashed again as I was just trying to type my user name! WTF???
I tried AGAIN because I'm in total disbelief at this point. And then it worked and I'm currently trying to redownload the game I was playing last, hoping cloud saves work.
EDIT: whoops, computer crashed again while downloading the game and now it's in a reboot loop because of the Steam launcher!!!!

Wow...

WHAT THE FUCK

Obviously I have to call the PC guy and ask what the hell is going on here. I never had anything even remotely like this in 8 years on Win 10. This dude has a legitimate business, does stuff for companies. My mom does his taxes, lol. Surely he knows how to install windows properly?? Is this a virus somehow? Where does it come from??

Does anybody here know what is going on??

I am beyond freaked out about all of this. I do not understand.