For all the genuine progress in PC hardware over the last decade in things like performance and reliability, one other attribute has quietly regressed, and that’s how understandable failures are. Older systems tended to fail decisively, with diagnoses that were easy to come by. A bad stick of RAM meant no POST. A dying hard drive clicked itself into an early grave. Power issues shut the system off, full stop. Modern PCs, by contrast, are fantastic at almost working. And that makes troubleshooting far harder than it used to be.