Large geeky rambling post incoming, and what this means for me over 1-2 weeks in the future.

Note: I've seen that my post on Steemit from 2 weeks ago has not transferred, so I'll manually be making HIVE and Steemit crossposts, and will try to get into the habit of crossposting to Golos as well!

Just ordered a PCI Express WiFi 6 (formerly known as 802.11ax) card with Bluetooth, because I figured that it was time to upgrade my wireless set up a bit, and do a bit of futureproofing.

I bought it on subscription so I saved £1.60, which I'll save on the other card; I chose 3 months because I hope by then to have my "new" PC set up and ready to go around that time, or not too long after, although realistically, I'll be stopping the sub after the second card arrives, even if I take time to put it in, although really, I want to have those cards deployed to every board that supports them, so perhaps I should also get one for my i5-650 board as well, but the priorities are definitely my current and future rigs; I have 3 months after each delivery to cancel my subscription in any case, but I definitely want to do a minimum of 2, as I plan to recommission the majority of my current setup as a secondary gaming PC for LAN gaming.

I do ideally want to get a 1660 Ti for my secondary rig, whilst putting the 1050 Ti into the 650 system, although the 1660 Ti is some time off. Equally, I was considering an "ultimate" XP build, and there does seem to be successful instances where a 1050 Ti can be used with Windows XP, so I should look into that. Either way, I'm definitely going to want to plan some major PC upgrades over a 3-month scale; the current plan is also to get a new case, so essentially I'll be removing the board from the current case (when I get it) replace the CPU with the i5 (initially planned for my new board, but I think the upgrade is needed now), take out the old wireless card and replace it with the new wireless card, and remove the current USB 3.0 card from it to replace with a USB card with fewer ports, as the new case has a USB 3.0 port.

In any case, it makes sense to stack up the upgrades and do them all at once, though I probably should also make plans to do the Windows 10 reinstall and the reinstall-upgrade of Linux Mint 19.3, though at the rate I'm going, I may just do 20.0! Either way, going all-in is probably a good idea, as I can then make sure that all my new hardware works with a fresh install of Linux Mint and Windows 10 (which I'll be updating before I install Linux Mint to prevent complications later, though I also need to be careful with those updates too, seeing as more recent ones have been fucking up Windows). With all the new iterations of the OS, certain games and apps should also be able to install fine too, but I pretty much will need to rebuild everything from scratch, although that said, I'll probably start backing up stuff to Google Apps now too, so it's no longer on my PC, and is accessible from multiple devices, especially if my PC is out of commission for about a week!

It will probably take me less time, but I'll probably block the upgrade interval for after my weekly stream, so I have a week to sort stuff out. It's relatively straightforward what I'm doing, just that it's a long process, but the gist of it is that I'll probably be less available online for 1-2 weeks (I'll need to plan out videos to publish too over that time) whilst I upgrade my PC, but will still be on via my mobile and tablet at least. I also want to eventually upgrade the RAM on my "work" laptop too, but that needs a little more planning and budgeting. In any case, I'll notify people of the upgrade/reinstall periods closer to the time, though more than likely I'll probably work on my laptop first as it would be the easiest thing to sort out as it's currently not in use (partly because of the poor performance under Windows 10, but also as it's supposed to be for "work"), so it's ready for me to do stuff with whenever I need a PC!

I appreciate this is quite long, so here's the TL;DR version:

I have new PC hardware arriving over the next few months and will take 1-2 weeks out to do the upgrades and also OS reinstalls, and will be planning that period after my weekly stream slot. Additionally, I hope to have my "work" laptop updated, so even if my desktop takes longer to sort, I'll have a PC to do most PC-type things. I'll be online less on most platforms over those 1-2 weeks, but I will use my phone/tablet to stay in touch and to deal with more urgent things.

But yeah, that's really it for now... like I said, I'll be informing people of this period when it comes up, so people know what to expect; I want to still get content happening video-wise, so there shouldn't be a gap with Stormhaven Media stuff, or so I hope! If there is, another update will be made.