By my count, today I build my 16th computer but were I to include rebuilds and replacements that number would triple but take out about a half dozen where I got to some point, realized I was in over my head and scrapped the whole thing.  The PC was nothing special and will be a Minecraft/web server which will leverage my reasonably fast 25/15 connection to save me the monthly cost of a VPS.  I had scheduled four hours to get the box up and running and I was able to boot to OS install in about 20 minutes.  20 minutes.  Installing the first 10 base-T card I’d ever seen took me two whole days and that was with the assistance of both a technical support expert and my then boss.

Building a computer is now officially easy.

Software, on the other hand, is still largely fucked.  It took me about 8 hours to figure out why updating my PHP version broke MySQL.  The fix?  Reinstall the OS.