The machine is replaceable, your files are not

Every good decision about a computer starts with separating the box from the contents.

A computer is a purchase. It has a price, a rough lifespan and a successor already sitting in a shop. If it were stolen this afternoon you would be angry and out of pocket, and in a week you would have another one on the desk. Your files are the opposite kind of object entirely. The photographs of people who are no longer here, the records that took a decade to accumulate, the writing nobody else has a copy of: none of that can be bought back, and no amount of money spent afterwards produces it again.

Owners tend to invert this without noticing. Enormous care goes into protecting the hardware, the case, the screen, the insurance, and comparatively little into the contents, which sit in exactly one place and have never been copied anywhere. Then a machine fails, which machines do, and the loss that follows has nothing to do with the value of the hardware. The hardware was always the cheap part. It just happened to be the visible one.

Getting this the right way round changes your reactions in a useful way. A slow computer stops being frightening, because slowness endangers nothing. A machine making an unfamiliar noise, or refusing to start, becomes a moment to think about whether your things exist anywhere else, rather than a moment to think about repair costs. The order matters. Protect the irreplaceable first, and everything after that is only money.