ND, I'd rather not, actually. It'd be a good way to keep the work life separate from the non-work life if I used a different machine...

Nanita -- that's a thought, but only if you're really not planning to use it again.

Sounds like you might have it covered. But my suggestion would be something like a refurbished ThinkPad 440 or 450.

[link]

A 4th or 5th gen i5 is still a very solid laptop CPU, barely any slower than a current gen i5 and T-Series Thinkpads are well built. My E-Series (the cheapest series) Thinkpad is 6 years old and still works fine and I've even dropped it a couple of times.

Connie it's all yours. I bought a new one earlier this year. I just need to wipe it.

Well, it's possible I won't need it, since I f got to the office this morning to discover the whole network has been down for 30 hours...

My computer keeps disconnecting from the internet. It had been happening pretty rarely, but now it's doing it every ten minutes or so. It usually resolves itself within a minute or so, and reconnects. It's just my home computer that's doing it -- when I use my work laptop at home, there's no problem -- so it's something with my computer and not with the internet connection. Resetting the router doesn't seem like it does anything to help. Any suggestions? I can't figure out what's causing this.

Wired connection or wireless?

If wired here's some things to try (and remember to change only one variable at a time):

1. Check to make sure the ethernet cable is correctly seated in the ethernet ports on the machine and the router.

2. Try a different cable.

3. Try plugging the cable into a different port on the router and the machine, if available.

I recently went through the same thing, and it was #2 that did the trick. Which is a bummer because earlier this year I'd spent time running cable through the walls and installing patch ports so that I didn't have to run a cable across a staircase anymore to connect my media center to the router. The only thing that fixed the issue was, alas, rerunning the a cable across the staircase. (Note to self — you still need to investigate what the hell is wrong with the connection. It worked for awhile.)

Wireless connection.

I'm starting to think about upgrading my computer. AMD's new 8 core Ryzen processors look pretty tempting. Unfortunately, it would require replacing the CPU, Motherboard, CPU cooler, and RAM which gets kinda expensive, especially since I want 32Gb of RAM like my computer currently has. I probably should go ahead and get a case and power supply too so I'm left with another fully functional computer from the leftover parts. That would leave me with a desktop with an i5-4690K, 32Gb of RAM, and a 500GB SSD to find a use for.

I'm not sure I'm ready to do an upgrade though. That would be like $800-$900 which is lot for a computer.

Why couldn't you at least reuse the SSD in the new 'puter?

I have a 500Gb M.2 NVMe that doesn't play well with my current Motherboard (it had M.2 when it was still pretty new and is a bit flakey) which I'd use with the new one.