I'm definitely a homelabber now.
I've recently learned that my husband was impressed by my hard drive replacement the other weekend, which is pretty cool. It was not a difficult thing to do, except for the screw placement thing I already complained about (and at length, offline), but it did take me a number or hours and it seems to be fairly wizardy to non-computer people. Personally it's more that I always felt like kind of an idiot for not knowing more about this stuff since computers impact us all so much, every day, so I'm glad to have expanded my skills.
The computer itself is a prebuilt computer from Cyberpower that my siblings gifted to my father and he used for his work for five or six years. It was not working well anymore, so he replaced it, but he didn't want to get rid of it so he kept it, and was perfectly happy to give it to me. I installed LInux Mint and some other stuff on it but it kept crashing, the hard drive issues became apparent when I learned how to check for that, and so I replaced it.
I'm very pleased to have taken something destined for the trash and made it useful again! I also learned a ton about how computers look on the inside, something I vaguely already knew because I've actually taken a number of computer science classes but I never learn anything unless I see it for myself. I wonder what else I can do with more of my cybertrash?
I also thought it was good that my kid both watched me repair something old and broken, and also helped me do it. She really enjoyed the can of air, and she learned that we don't just throw away old and broken things, we can fix and keep using them. She understood the computer has her favorite movies and how we needed to do some work to be able to watch them!
Right now I am using the computer to self-host Plex, Paperless-ngx and Immich, and as a NAS since it's also storing all the media and files each of those are using.
Last weekend I spent very little time on the computer and everything just worked, which was very nice!
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