Last week, my faithful PC Monster X took a dive. His USB circuitry wouldn’t recognize the mouse or keyboard, effectively ending his very productive lifespan.

Monster X was a Dell XPS computer I bought back in 2008. At the time, he was truly a monster: oversized tower with a 750W power supply, 4GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive, plus an Intel Core Duo. That was top-of-the-line at the time.

Over the years, Monster X had his issues: I’ve replaced the hard drive twice, added another optical drive, and upgraded the graphics card. As a behemoth tower PC, he was fully able to handle all the upgrades, which is why I chose that large-scale tower PC design.

I had scheduled a replacement for Monster X sometime this year. He would have turned 6 in April, which is about as long as I want to keep a computer. But then his USB interface dropped dead, so he was retired earlier and replaced by a new box, which I’ve named Enzo.

Enzo was made locally — a “Mom & Pop” system. I prefer to buy local because of the better support: Should Enzo have any issues, I just drive him over to the shop (about a mile away) and they’ll fix him. That’s far more convenient than buying a computer at a Big Box store, where you can’t even return the thing.

I amped up Enzo as much as I could: He has a fast i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive. I could have opted for the 120GB SSD, which is faster, but I tend to fill up hard drives so that wasn’t a consideration — for now.

Once I got Enzo home, my first task was to perform transplant surgery with Monster X’s GeForce GTX 680. That hefty expansion card barely fit inside Enzo’s case. In fact, I had to remove the hard drive to get the card inserted. But it fits and it works.

Next step was to restore my personal files. Fortunately, Monster X had an external hard drive (hint-hint) and it ran Windows Backup every week (hint-hint), so I lost no files.

Let me repeat that: I lost no files.

Backup is so vital, I can’t express it enough! Not all the files restored, however: For some stupid reason, Windows Backup doesn’t copy files not found in the traditional Windows pre-created folders. So I had to transplant Monster X’s hard drive into Enzo, copy over the rest of the files (mostly programming stuff) and then I was done.

The final step is reinstalling programs. That was pretty easy because most of them are downloads. The rest I have the original optical discs. Oh, and I have all the registration numbers and keys, so everything worked smoothly — except for Microsoft Office 2013. Microsoft refused to let me re-install because the user key had already been used. So I phoned them up for a manual authorization.

I’ve never manually authorized a Microsoft product before, but it was about as painful as an appendectomy using a can opener. I’ll probably rant about that process in detail in a later blog post.

The end result: Enzo is up and running. I’m happy. I’m back in business. That’s the way it should be.